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. In effect, the public loses out, since less data can be searched for.

However, I think this takes a somewhat limited view on what an API can be. In fact, if the API is designed properly then the API itself can be discovered via a crawler, along with all the information the API provider chooses to make public. This is particularly true for RESTful APIs where ‘discoverability’ is a fundamental design concept. For example, in the open source RESTx project – a fast and simple way to create RESTful web services – a RESTful, documented and fully discoverable API is created automatically. (more…)

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, but let me first provide a little background on RESTx. If you are already familiar with RESTx, you can skip over the next chapter.

RESTx: A quick introduction

RESTx – we believe – is the fastest way to create RESTful web services. RESTx is a fully RESTful, small, stand-alone server. A RESTx server houses components – code that implements some functionality for data access, integration or processing, written in either Java or Python. (more…)

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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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. I was hooked. No wonder some people describe it as ‘executable pseudo code’: Just write down what you want and for the most part, it will actually work.

Now there’s a price to pay for this increased developer productivity, where the interpreter somehow figures out at run time what it is that you actually want to do and how to let your code deal with all sorts of different types: Python is interpreted, it’s dynamic and this means that for the most part it’s slower than compiled languages.

In this article here, I will talk about an interesting optimization technique for Python, which will come as a surprise to many Python developers.
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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. As developers, we already know about a concise, standardized and very well defined way to express what we want: The programming languages we use every day! Why should we have to deal with complex, unfamiliar configuration files or UI tools that still restrict us in what we can do, if it is often so much more concise and simple to just write down in code what you want to have done?

Therefore, RESTx embraces custom code: Writing it and expressing your data integration logic with it is made as simple as possible.

Let me illustrate how straight forward it is to integrate data resources using just a few lines of clear, easy to read code.

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