Recently I saw this question posted in a forum: “Does REST have better performance than SOAP”?

This question is symptomatic of a fundamental misunderstanding of REST, I think. SOAP is a particular protocol used to implement RPC functionality. REST, on the other hand, is not a technology or protocol, but an architectural style. Systems that were built with the REST architectural style are fundamentally different from RPC based systems. For REST, we think in resources and data.

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REST – the REpresentational State Transfer as defined in Roy Fielding’s thesis –  is not a protocol, a standard, an API, a technology or a product. You cannot buy it, you can’t download and install it and you don’t need to poke another hole in your firewall for it. Instead, REST lives at a level completely decoupled form any specific technology, protocol or product, because REST is merely an architectural style: A set of constraints and principles,

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Version 0.9.4 of RESTx – the fastest way to create RESTful web services – has just been released. The main features introduced by this version are the ability to write components in server-side JavaScript, the addition of a JavaScript client library and much improved handling of content types for input and output. You can download it now.

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Recently, there was an interesting article on ReadWriteWeb questioning the long term effect of the proliferation of public APIs, versus merely offering crawlable data. On one hand – the article argued – APIs offer a great deal of control to the publisher and they are great for access to real-time information. On the other hand, if data is only accessible through an API then it is not available for spiders and crawlers and thus won’t show up in search results.

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Ever now and then you find a new piece of software or feature, which ends up changing the way you work, saving you time and just overall making things easier for you and your organization. We think that the RESTx project with its new 0.9.2 release gains such a feature. We call it “specialized components”. What is that, why is it useful and how will it make things easier for you? In a moment I will use an example for illustration,

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Today we are happy to announce the release of version 0.9.2 of RESTx – the fastest and simplest way to create RESTful web services.

Besides the usual, numerous small improvements and fixes there are also a number of exciting major new features and capabilities:

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We have put up a screencast that shows you how to get started with RESTx, our platform for the rapid, easy creation of RESTful web services.

RESTx allows developers to contribute data access, integration and processing components in Java or Python, using a very simple API. Then, with nothing more than a browser and a simple HTML form, users provide parameters for those components,

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Our RESTx project – a platform for the rapid and easy creation of RESTful web services and resources – is largely written in Python. Python is a dynamic, duck-typed programming language, which puts very little obstacles between your idea and working code. At least that’s the feeling I had when I started to work with Python several years ago: Never before was I able to be so productive, so quickly with so few lines of code.

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In this article, I will show you how RESTx – an open source project for the creation of RESTful web services and RESTful resources – allows front-end developers to quickly and easily make their own data resources, without having to rely on the back-end server team for every new requirement.

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Most people who ever worked in real-world data integration projects agree that at some point custom code becomes necessary. Pre-fabricated connectors, filter and pipeline logic can only go so far. And to top it off, using those pre-fabricated integration logic components often becomes cumbersome for anything but the most trivial data integration and processing tasks.

With RESTx – a platform for the rapid creation of RESTful web services – we recognize that custom code will always remain part of serious data integration tasks.

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