Portable Javascript Client for a REST API

Question

I'm about to create a JavaScript-based client for a RESTful webservice. The client should facilitate access to the webservice and wrap some raw HTTP calls into more "candy" functions and objects.

I'm intending to use this client library for node.js-based applications as well as for PhoneGap. So, I don't have to care about the Same-origin-policy. However, dispatching HTTP requests is totally differnt in PhoneGap and node.js.

Now I'm wondering how I can implement a client library in JavaScript, that is portable between different "platforms" (node.js, PhoneGap, perhaps later even browers)?

Thanks in advance

Answer 1

Phonegap is basically just a browser. So if you want to get around the same origin policy you might want to take a look into different phonegap plugins (GapSocket) to handle your own communication.

Answer 2

You might try this emulation of XmlHttpRequest under nodejs but you still may need to special-case your client library to operate under PhoneGap (and other browser-based JavaScript platorms) and nodejs.

One way to do this would be to check the contents of 'window' which is undefined by default under nodejs, or 'global' which is (should be) undefined in a browser.

EDIT

It appears I spoke(wrote) too soon. Check out abstract-http-request which while not explicitly supporting PhoneGap, might give you enough to work with.

Answer 3

REST is an architectural style for designing web services. A web service doesn't have to use HTTP to be RESTful, though a large proportion of them do. To be RESTful, an HTTP-based web service has to rigorously leverage HTTP's resource names (URIs), operations (GET, PUT, DELETE, etc), error codes (404, 200, ...), and so on. This means that any (HTTP-based) REST client framework can interoperate with any (HTTP-based) REST server framework: if it doesn't, something's probably wrong. So your problem decomposes into finding a good generic REST client framework and one or more generic REST server frameworks.

For node.js based web services, take a look at the Geddy server-side framework (here's the documentation ).

For a PhoneGap REST client, you could try the Force.com JavaScript REST Toolkit (and see this extension ).

Disclaimer: I have only read about these frameworks, not used them.