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Thursday, March 7, 2013

REST vs RPC in Web Service Development

Ive been implementing web services using lightweight web service protocols such as XML-RPCJSON-RPC and (my favorite although proprietary) YAML-RPC for some time now.

I had some discussions last year about web service development using REST, a concept I had heard about for some time, but I did not see the advantages of it.  I knew that it had become the predominate web development architecture model, but for some reason I could not see the advantages of REST over pure lightweight RPC approaches.

My first experiences with an RPC protocol over HTTP was with SOAP, which is a technology I've grown to strongly dislike; now I consider SOAP a horrible enterprise technology since it's cumbersome and expensive to implement and often suffers from serious compatibility issues between different vendor implementations (Qore also has SOAP support - both server and client, however I would recommend avoiding it if you can).   My great appreciation for the lightweight RPC over HTTP protocols listed above is to no small degree based on my dislike of SOAP, so when hearing and reading about REST, I could not see that it would be as great a leap as from SOAP to XML-RPC for example.

(As a footnote Wikipedia lists XML-RPC as the precursor to SOAP, which makes SOAP an absolutely classic case of overengineering by committee - since from my point of view XML-RPC with all its faults is vastly superior to SOAP.  Also here is a link which humorously sums up my thoughts on SOAP: http://harmful.cat-v.org/software/xml/soap/simple)

However, finally I've gotten into REST a little deeper, and having developed an initial RestHandler for the Qore HTTP server, the advantages of a REST architecture are completely clear and compelling.

Using REST forces you to have a logical and straightforward organization of your web service development.  Each type of object will have it's own URL, and (in the Qore RestHandler at least) it will have a dedicated class to handle requests to objects of that type.

For example, in the Qore RestHandler, if you register a class with the name "workflows" at the root level of your REST handler, then a request like

   GET /workflows

will be directed to your workflow class's get() method, which will handle the request.

Classes (and therefore URLs) can be stacked, so a request like

   GET /workflows/1/instances/2?action=stop

Will be directed to the appropriate class's "getStop()" method.   If the appropriate method name (derived from the HTTP method name in the request and any action verb given as a URI argument) is not implemented in the class, then the RestHandler returns a user-friendly 400 response.

This easy and logical hierarchical organization of the objects corresponding to the URLs along with the simple dispatching to handler methods of objects of the appropriate class makes implementing the REST service trivial in Qore.

Additionally, the RestHandler transparently takes care of deserializing request bodies based on the HTTP Content-Type header and serializing any response body based on the client's HTTP Accept header.

This also makes the REST approach superior to the lightweight RPC protocols mentioned above.

It's easy to see why REST is the dominant web service architecture; Qore's RestHandler will continue to be under active development for the upcoming release of Qore (0.8.8), and I hope it will be useful for others as well.

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