REST

ONEsite’s REST (Representational State Transfer) API offers a quick, easy, effective and rapid method toremotely access commonly used functionality of the ONEsite Social Networking Platform. Using a REST call,formatted in a similar manner to the familiar Internet URL, you are able to request information directly fromONEsite servers from your servers.

The responses from these calls to the ONEsite REST API can be blendeddirectly with your own service offerings to give you a high degree of control and flexibility over how yourepresent your service to your clients. For example, you could host your own blog postings pages while usingthe ONEsite REST API to handle comments or an RSS feed of the blog postings.

The Benefits of the REST API

The ONEsite platform is built upon the concepts of horizontal scalability and a service-oriented-architecture. We use our own web services internally to construct the web pages and features on standard social network.The ONEsite REST API provides improved response times and reliability due to load balancing and integrated support for caching. Additionally, REST improves server scalability by reducing the need to maintain communication state. This means that different servers can be used to handle initial and subsequent requests.

Furthermore, as these requests are handled, less client-side software is required to be written because a single browser can access any application and any resource.Any modern programming language can utilize the data generated by the ONEsite REST API. Because all services are requested by a URL and all data is returned as XML the underlying programming language is not significant.

ONEsite partners utilize Java, PHP, .NET, Python, Ruby and other programming languages to integrate with ONEsite.

Examples of REST Uses

The ONEsite REST services may be accessed from a number of different locations:

  • Client Browser – i.e. a directly link to a REST RSS feed for a Blog RSS chiclet; using REST inside of a Adobe Flash file to load image thumbnails for a particular contest gallery
  • ONEsite Platform
    • Modules – ONEsite modules may access the REST API and then format the resulting
    • XML Pages – Pages running through the ONEsite filter may access REST for advanced functionality
  • Third Party Sites – ONEsite partners may access the REST services to bring social network functionality and/or data into pages or services hosted externally