If you’ve evaluated RESTx, our brand new platform for building RESTful web services, you’ve certainly noticed its Python-Java hybrid nature. Indeed, besides its vocation of being the simplest way to create RESTful web services, RESTx has been designed with the idea of letting programmers use their favorite JVM language when creating resource components.

So far, we naturally had Python, with which the RESTx core has been written, and Java, the default language of the JVM. We’re happy to announce that, since version 0.9.4, it is now possible to write RESTx components with JavaScript!

By adding support for JavaScript in RESTx, our goal was to open the door of RESTful web services and application integration to web developers. To be sure, the need for integrating systems and applications is not the preserve of enterprise developers anymore, especially with the advent of SaaS and cloud computing. With RESTx, web developers can now accomplish such a complex task within the comfort of their favorite language. (more…)

Version 0.9.4 of RESTx – the fastest way to create RESTful web services – has just been released. The main features introduced by this version are the ability to write components in server-side JavaScript, the addition of a JavaScript client library and much improved handling of content types for input and output. You can download it now.
(more…)

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:
(more…)

We have put up a screencast that shows you how to get started with RESTx, our platform for the rapid, easy creation of RESTful web services.

RESTx allows developers to contribute data access, integration and processing components in Java or Python, using a very simple API. Then, with nothing more than a browser and a simple HTML form, users provide parameters for those components, which the RESTx server uses to create new RESTful web services, resulting in easy to use, safe URIs that give users access to the data they need. For example, a developer may contribute a component for access to the API of a legacy application, but the users now provide different sets of query parameters, resulting in resources such as ‘customer list’, ‘order queue’, etc. (more…)

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.
(more…)

In this article, I will show you how RESTx – an open source project for the creation of RESTful web services and RESTful resources – allows front-end developers to quickly and easily make their own data resources, without having to rely on the back-end server team for every new requirement.
(more…)

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.

(more…)

We are happy to introduce RESTx, a new open source project from MuleSoft. We believe that RESTx is quite simply the quickest and easiest way to create RESTful resources and RESTful web services in your enterprise or in the cloud, to integrate data and to make your data ready to be integrated. (more…)