RESTful Mapbender Evaluation
From MapbenderWiki
Contents |
Introduction
By nature the software Mapbender will follow a RESTful approach. Mapbender is all about late binding of URI via http. It only adds glue in places where technical interfaces (here: OGC web services) are better encapsulated to enable usability for the uneducated. The first step of this work group is to find out how much of this approach is already RESTful and what has to be done to leverage the concept more. Where does SOAP come into play? From what I gather at the moment nowhere - for the simple reason that all SOAP implementations that I know of do not need anything Mapbender-like because they already have something in their stack that connects and scales perfectly using their SOAP interfaces. Whether this something is what the users need is another discussion altogether. If your SERVICE ORIENTED ARCHITECTURE ENTERPRISE BUS is big enough you can always bend the user instead of the software.
See the Slapshgeo Poll for an overview of what people overview.
General information
It is somewhat hard to find information regarding RESTful approaches because it is not inline with corporate product marketing plans (taken from [1]):
- "From a product perspective, REST is almost invisible," says Ronald Schmeltzer, a senior analyst with Zap Think. "If the REST people want to have their day, they're going to have to get it into the tools that create or consume Web services."
On the other hand one does not need much to get started (read Sean Gillies' use of vim):
- Mark Baker (independent Web architecture consultant) disagrees. He says virtually any HTTP-compliant tool could be used to develop REST Web services. "There are a whole lot of REST tool kits available, it's just that people don't know what they are," he says.
- The canonical work has been compiled in the dissertation by Roy Fielding
Wikipedia
Comparison
Architectures
- Lessons learned from the soundadvice blog: http://www.soundadvice.id.au/blog/2007/06/10/#lessonsOfTheWeb
- http://soundadvice.id.au/blog/
Further Reading
- http://blog.geobliki.com/articles/2007/08/06/a-wfs-basic-as-a-geo-atom-store by Patrice Cappelaere
Books
Leonard Richardson, Sam Ruby: RESTful Web Services, Sebastopol, 2007
