Case Studies Using Adobe™ Flex

2. Developing Rest Web Services-Based Applications

Representational State Transfer (REST) is a hybrid architectural style derived from several of network-based architecture styles and combined with additional constraints that defines a uniform connector interface. REST was stemmed from a PhD dissertation by Roy Fielding in 2000 (Fielding, 2000). Basically, it refers to a stateless client/server architecture where Web services and any other kind of reachable object such as document or image files are viewed as resources. Resources are identified by their Uniform Resource Identifiers (URIs) and they can be accessed through a standard transfer protocol such as the HyperText Transfer Protocol (HTTP) by using the GET, POST, PUT, and DELETE methods. In fact, requests and responses to actions over resources are based on transferring representations to capture the current or intended state of the resources (“REST application programming,” 2010).

A REST-based (Application Programming Interface) API is a URI or a collection of URIs that can manage create, read, update and delete (CRUD) operations. Typically, a REST-based API exposes a base URI which is a URI common to all resources and serves as the entry point to the API. Moreover, REST-based APIs are programming language independent because they are accessible from any language that has an HTTP client library, including ActionScript, Java and PHP (“REST application programming,” 2010).