Final Thesis: Towards Offline Support for Restful Applications
Abstract: Representational State Transfer (REST) is an efficient and by now established architectural style for distributed hypermedia systems. However, REST has not been designed for more than short-term offline operations, yet many applications must keep functioning when going offline for more than a few seconds. Burdening the application with knowledge about offline status is undesirable. We define a function to derive a finite-state machine for the client side based on a formal model to describe RESTful systems as finite-state machine. We then extend existing caching approaches for offline operation so that a client-side proxy can transparently hide the offline status from the application for all derived states. We validate our solution with a proxy layer that covers all state-model derived test cases. Using our model and proxy, clients do not have to know and worry about whether they are online or offline.
Keywords: REST, hypermedia, offline capability
PDFs: Master Thesis, Work Description
Reference: Tobias Fertig. Towards Offline Support for Restful Applications. Master Thesis, Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg: 2016.