GemFire REST API Overview

GemFire REST API Overview

By using the GemFire REST application interface, you can immediately access GemFire's data management capabilities in languages other than the natively supported Java language.

You can write REST-enabled client applications for GemFire in a variety of languages that use the open and standard HTTP protocol-- for example, Ruby, Python, JavaScript and Scala, as well as already supported languages such as Java.

When you access GemFire through the REST interface, objects are stored in GemFire as PdxInstances. A PdxInstance is a light-weight wrapper around PDX serialized bytes. It provides applications with run-time access to fields of a PDX serialized object. This interoperable format allows your Java applications to operate on the same data as your REST applications.

As an added benefit, because GemFire's REST interface stores objects as PdxInstances, you do not need to write corresponding Java classes to translate JSON data (which you must do with other REST interface providers such as Oracle Coherence.) For example, consider the use case where a non-Java REST client application (Python, Ruby or Scala) performs GemFire region operations with JSON data that represents employee data. Since the object is stored in GemFire as a PdxInstance that can be automatically mapped to JSON, the user does not need to write a corresponding class and also does not need to worry about related issues such as keeping the Employee object in the CLASSPATH.

See GemFire PDX Serialization for more information on PDX serialization.