PROJECT TITLE :

Design Patterns and Extensibility of REST API for NetWorking Applications

ABSTRACT:

REST architectural vogue has become a prevalent choice for distributed resources, like the northbound API of software-defined networking (SDN). As services typically undergo frequent changes and updates, the corresponding REST APIs would like to vary and update accordingly. To permit REST APIs to vary and evolve without breaking its clients, a REST API can be designed to facilitate hypertext-driven navigation and its connected mechanisms to accommodate structure changes within the API. This paper addresses the problems in hypertext-driven navigation in REST APIs from 3 aspects. First, we present REST Chart, a Petri-Internet-primarily based REST service description framework and language to style extensible REST APIs, and it's applied to deal with the rapid evolution of SDN northbound APIs. Second, we describe some important style patterns, like backtracking and generator, within the REST Chart framework to navigate through large scale APIs in the RESTful design. Third, we gift a client facet differential cache mechanism to reduce the overhead of hypertext-driven navigation, addressing a significant issue that affects the applying of REST API. The proposed approach is applied to applications in SDN, that is integrated with a generalized SDN controller, SOX. The benefits of the proposed approach are verified in several conditions. Experimental results on SDN applications show that on average, the proposed cache mechanism reduces the overhead of using the hypertext-driven REST API by sixty six%, whereas fully maintaining the required flexibility and extensibility of the REST API.