RESTful Web Services

Using the RESTful Web Service plugin business logic can be exposed as a RESTful Web Service.

The RESTful Web Service plugin does not contain any client side functions or properties, it is a 100% server side operating plugin.

To create a RESTful Web Service, all that is needed is to create a form in a solution and add the following methods to the form:

• ws_read() for the GET operation
• ws_create() for the POST operation
• ws_delete() for the DELETE operation
• ws_update() for the PUT operation

The RESTful Web Service API is published on the Servoy Application Server through the url: <serverUrl>/servoy-service/rest_ws/solutionName/formName

RESTful Web Services are to be stateless. As subsequent requests to the RESTful Web Service API might be handled by different headless clients in the pool of clients configured for the plugin, do not save any state. This means at least the following:

• Do not use global or form variables
• Do not use the solution model API
• Do not alter the state of the a form's UI

For more information on RESTfull Web Services, see:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Representational_State_Transfer
http://www.infoq.com/articles/rest-introduction
http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/webservices/library/ws-restful/
http://home.ccil.org/~cowan/restws.pdf

In each method, the required business logic can be coded. Make sure all methods are stateless, thus do not rely on form and/or global variables, do not alter the solution blueprint using the solution model or change the state of forms as subsequent calls to the API can be handled by different headless clients.

A sample solution is included in the Servoy distribution (servoy_sample_rest_ws.servoy), detailing how to retrieve data from the http request and to return a response.

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