RESTful IDEAS

About a year ago, I published a white paper entitled: "Beyond S1000D: an SOA Enabled Interoperability Framework for the Aerospace Industry".

The white paper proposed a framework called "Integrated Documentation Environment for Aircraft Support (IDEAS)" for the interoperability of enterprise content management and publishing systems within the aerospace industry. The goal was to allow new capabilities such as the remote access to library services, cross-repository exchange, cross-repository aggregation, and cross-repository observation.

Global aerospace organizations acquire technical publications from multiple suppliers and business partners. They must address the following challenges:

• The elimination of the high costs associated with paper libraries and the shipping of physical products such as paper, CDs, and DVDs.


• The safety and regulatory compliance concerns related to the slow distribution of supplements to field sites.


• The need for a single point of access to the multitude of technical documentation needed to maintain and operate aerospace equipments.

The IDEAS concept was created to address current inefficiencies in technical data management processes within the industry by taking advantage of Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) and emerging content management standards such as the JSR 170 Content Repository for Java Technology API.

One the Java EE platform, JSR 170 is enjoying a lot of success in terms of adoption and implementation. In the Open Source world, the Apache Jackrabbit project continues to evolve and there is now a Spring JSR 170 Module to simplify development with the very popular Spring Framework.

For cross-platform interoperability, SOA based solutions have traditionally relied on web services standards such as SOAP, WSDL, and UDDI. However, in today's Web 2.0 world, alternative approaches such as the Representational State Transfer (REST) architectural style and the OpenSearch specification (for federated searches) are getting a lot of attention for their simplicity and scalability.

REST is based on the notion that resources on the web are URI-addressable and that all CRUD (Create, Retrieve, Update and Delete) operations on those resources can be implemented through a generic interface (e.g., HTTP GET, POST, PUT, DELETE). In contrast, RPC-based mechanisms such as SOAP use many custom methods and expose a single or few endpoint URIs. It turned out that the requirements for interoperable enterprise content management systems are more amenable to the REST architectural style.

The resurgence of REST can be felt across the application development landscape. Struts 2 introduced a REST-style improvement to action mapping called Restful2ActionMapper (itself inspired by the REST support in Ruby on Rails). Support for RESTful web applications is been added to JSF through the RestFaces project. REST APIs are also easy to implement with scripting languages such as JavaScript and FreeMarker.

The technical documentation needed to operate and maintain an airline's fleet is supplied by several manufacturers including aircraft, engine, and component manufacturers. Regulatory agencies ( FAA and the NTSB) also publish documents such as Advisory Circulars (ACs), Airworthiness Directives (ADs), and various forms and regulations. If all these organizations expose their content repositories via OpenSearch, then an airline technician will be able to perform a federated search across all those repositories to obtain technical information about particular equipment. The results could be formatted in ATOM to allow the technician to receive updates via web feed.

To expose a library service with a REST-style API, a content management system would typically need to provide the following:

1. A description of the service including URI templates, HTTP method binding, authentication, transaction, response content types, and response status


2. The specification of the code (script or Java ) that is executed on the invocation of the URI


3. Response templates

JSR 311, the Java API for RESTful Web Services will define a set of Java APIs for the development of Web services built according to the REST architectural style.