Feeling RESTful? Well, first we’ll define a Web Service –A web page meant to be consumed by a computer via an autonomous program as opposed to a web browser or similar UI tool. –XML via http. URI: Uniform Resource Identifier –URI vs URL: URL may be thought of as a subset of URI. –URI = method and location

Feeling RESTful? REpresentational State Transfer It’s a technology, not a tool. The Web already works this way –Resources are identified by URI’s –Messages are self-descriptive and stateless –Client-server –Cached –Layered –Code on demand State means the session or application state –Success/fail –Part of the content transferred from client to server back to client –State is never left in limbo

Feeling RESTful? Message looks familiar: http, URI, etc. –XML is the most popular transport –Unlike SOAP and XML-RPC, REST does not require a new message format –The XmlHttpRequest object lets you do REST from inside a web page REST verbs –GET: Retrieve –POST: Add new –PUT: Update –DELETE: um…Delete!

WCF – not a swear word! Windows Communication Foundation –Microsoft says: “Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) is a framework for building service-oriented applications. Using WCF, you can send data as asynchronous messages from one service endpoint to another. A service endpoint can be part of a continuously available service hosted by IIS, or it can be a service hosted in an application. An endpoint can be a client of a service that requests data from a service endpoint. The messages can be as simple as a single character or word sent as XML, or as complex as a stream of binary data.” –Service Oriented Architecture = SOA

If you have the stones… From web site: “cURL is a command line tool for transferring data with URL syntax, supporting DICT, FILE, FTP, FTPS, GOPHER, HTTP, HTTPS, IMAP, IMAPS, LDAP, LDAPS, POP3, POP3S, RTMP, RTSP, SCP, SFTP, SMTP, SMTPS, TELNET and TFTP. curl supports SSL certificates, HTTP POST, HTTP PUT, FTP uploading, HTTP form based upload, proxies, cookies, user+password authentication (Basic, Digest, NTLM, Negotiate, kerberos...), file transfer resume, proxy tunneling and a busload of other useful tricks.”

But where are the Argonauts? From the web site: “JSON (JavaScript Object Notation) is a lightweight data-interchange format. It is easy for humans to read and write. It is easy for machines to parse and generate. It is based on a subset of the JavaScript Programming Language, Standard ECMA rd Edition - December JSON is a text format that is completely language independent but uses conventions that are familiar to programmers of the C- family of languages, including C, C++, C#, Java, JavaScript, Perl, Python, and many others. These properties make JSON an ideal data-interchange language.”

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Thanks! Bruce A. Holt Project Lead Neiman Marcus Information Services Office Cell