RESTful interface

The components of the monitoring framework use a restful web interface to exchange data. This section is a full documentation of the interface as well as codes examples, showcasing how the interface can be used and extended.

Concept

Restful web service is a light weight remote procedure call (rpc) interface, using a client-server architecture. The server provides a number of methods that can be called by the client. Therefor client and server are connected via TCP using HTTP as message protocol. Methods are identified by an URI in the HTTP header. The payload of a message, the returned value of a method, is encoded in XML.

A detailed description of RESTful web service can be found at :
​http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Representational_state_transfer
​http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/webservices/library/ws-restful/

Example call

To call a method on the Rest server a HTTP POST message has to be send to the server. This POST message has to contain the URI (name of the method) and a number of arguments, if necessary for the call.