Home // International Journal On Advances in Networks and Services, volume 4, numbers 3 and 4, 2011 // View article

REST-Event: A REST Web Service Framework for Building Event-Driven Web

Authors:
Li Li
Wu Chou

Keywords: Web service, REST, Topic Hubs, Event-driven, EDA.

Abstract:
As the World Wide Web is becoming a communication and collaboration platform, there is an acute need for an infrastructure to disseminate real-time events over the Web. However, such infrastructure is still seriously lacking as conventional distributed event-based systems are not designed for the Web. To address this issue, we describe a REST web service framework, REST-Event. It represents and organizes the concepts and elements of Event-Driven Architecture (EDA) as REST (Representational State Transfer) web services. Our approach leads to a layered eventdriven web, in which event actors, subscriptions and event channels are separated. As an integration framework, RESTEvent specifies a set of minimal REST services to support event systems, such that generic two-way event channels can be created and managed seamlessly through a process called subscription entanglement. A special form of event-driven web, called topic web, is proposed and built based on REST-Event. The advantages and applications of topic web are presented and discussed, including addressability, connectedness, dynamic topology, robustness and scalability. In addition, a prototype topic web for presence driven collaboration is developed. Preliminary performance tests show that the proposed approach is feasible and advantageous.

Pages: 292 to 301

Copyright: Copyright (c) to authors, 2011. Used with permission.

Publication date: April 30, 2012

Published in: journal

ISSN: 1942-2644