REST compliant clients for REST APIs

Abstract

In today's distributed systems, REST services play a centric role in defining applications' architecture. Current technologies and literature focus on building server-side REST applications. But they fail to build generic and REST compliant client solutions. Therefore, most offered services and especially client applications rarely comply to the constraints that constitute the REST architecture. In this thesis, the architecture of a new generic framework for building REST compliant client applications is introduced. In addition, a new description language that conforms to REST's constraints and helps reduce development time is presented. We describe in this work the building-blocks of the proposed solutions and show a software implementation of a library that leverages the solutions' architectures. Using the proposed framework and description language, client applications that conform to the full set of REST's constraints can be built in an easy and optimized way. In addition, REST service providers can rely on the proposed description language to eliminate the complexity of repetitively building customized solutions for different technologies or platforms.