| If we divided the Internet into two categories, a logical distinction might be the human-readable web and the machine-readable web. The human-readable web consists of the type of content with which a person would interact or view. The machine-readable web is designed to be used by software. Driving the machine-readable web are web services; applications designed to support machine-to-machine interaction over a network. There are currently two primary approaches for designing and building web services: SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol) and REST (Representational State Transfer).;Although RESTful web services are more scalable, more efficient, and tend to be easier to implement than SOAP web services, most web service development tools available focus on SOAP web services. While there is a growing interest in web services in general and, therefore, an increase in the number of development tools, there is still a shortage of RESTful web service development tools.;My aim is to help fill that void by examining the issues associated with tool support for designing, implementing, and maintaining RESTful web services. The RESTful Application Framework Generator, or RAFGen, is an extensible application that can generate RESTful web services in one of two scripting languages, Python and PHP. RAFGen utilizes the newly developed Resource Description Language (RDL) specification language to specify the features associated with a RESTful web service. RAFGen processes RDL documents and generates the files necessary to create the specified web service, including the creation of all the necessary logic to direct requests to the correct resource and the creation of all the needed function bodies stubbed out, ready for the developer.;Evaluation of RAFGen will show its ease of use and prove its efficiency as a RESTful web service generator. To evaluate RAFGen, I have manually coded a web service application in both Python and PHP in order to compare the creation times and to have an existing application against which to evaluate RAFGen's generated code. This evaluation will provide a measurement of the time a developer will save by using RAFGen as well as a standard by which to compare the code. |
