Realized that I had this draft från Michael Mohens session at EMC World around Documentum REST and decided to publish it even though time have passed and the REST-interface has been shipped and now we are waiting for xCP 2.1
REST mimics the way users use the Internet.
Everything is a resource and it is stateless – the server does not need to know where you come from and where you are going.
REST Services are programming/language/framework independent. Any language which has an HTTP framework. No SDK required.
If it is stateless it is much easier to scale. No session to replicated since the state is not persisted on the server side.
No SDK also means that there are no clients to upgrade so also scalability from an IT management perspective.
Acknowledges that EMC IIG have talked about that for a while but now they are ready to deliver.
Technology Preview 1 for Core Platform announced on March 2013.
TP1 for xCP (generated by the actual application that you developed)
- Business Objects
- Content
- Folders
- Relationship
REST also coming for Captiva and D2 so D2FS is going away in the long run.
REST is shipping early Q3 2013 for Documentum 7 with the following features:
- Authentication
- Repository services
- Object Services
- Version Services
- Schema Services
What is not in the first release (end user services had prioritization):
- Lightweight object services
- Access control (you can’t create a new ACL)
- Lifecycle services
- Virtual document services
xCP REST GA will be part of xCP 2.1 in Q1 2014
- The concept is to automatically generated (almost everything will get a REST interface).
Spring is the biggest framework in the Java world.
Still deploy REST as w WAR-file just like Webtop or Media Workspace. API is stateless for HA and deployment flexibility. Previously it was bound to a host name.
Simple JSON and XML representations.
Authentication
- HTTP basic authentication (great for inline passwords, make sure HTTPS is used!)
- SPNEGO-based Kerberos (great for users in AD domain. (Can be done across multiple domains but be in the same forest with two-way forest)
Pushing for SAML later on.
Default response is XML but butting objects.json? will switch to JSON representation.
The REST War-file is designed to live outside the content server. Important if you want to place it in another part of the DMZ to allow mobile access.
DQL is right now read-only operations. Done using HTTP GET.