REST to JavaScript for better client-side development

Abstract

In today's Web-centric era, embedded systems become mashup various web services via RESTful web services. RESTful web services use REST APIs that describe actions as resource state transfers via standard HTTP methods such as GET, PUT, POST, and DELETE. While RESTful web services are lightweight and executable on any platforms that support HTTP methods, writing programs composed of only such primitive methods is not a familiar concept to developers. Therefore, no single design strategy for (fully) RESTful APIs works for arbitrary domains, and current REST APIs are system dependent, incomplete, and likely to change. To help sever-side development of REST APIs, several domain-specific languages such as WADL, WSDL 2.0, and RDF provide automatic tools to generate REST APIs. However, client-side developers who often do not know the web services domain and do not understand RESTful web services suffer from the lack of any development help. In this paper, we present a new approach to build JavaScript APIs that are more accessible to client-side developers than REST APIs. We show a case study of our approach that uses JavaScript APIs and their wrapper implementation instead of REST APIs, and we describe the efficiency in the client-side development.