SRP HTTP Framework – Create REST APIs for OpenInsight

Early last year I posted an article advertising my 2016 Revelation User’s Conference presentation: RESTing before RevCon 2016. If you are unfamiliar with REST, then please take a moment to review this presentation preview and then return here. As noted in that blog post, and then reinforced at the conference, SRP has been using REST APIs as the bedrock of our mobile and web application projects. The goal of the presentation was to encourage developers to consider REST APIs as a way of adding value to their applications. Also, in keeping with SRP’s mission to enable and educate, we outlined the steps necessary to support RESTful URLs within an OpenInsight (OECGI) platform.

After the presentation we received inquiries on whether we had a commercial product for creating OpenInsight based REST APIs. Given that our practice is to create reusable solutions, our response was “yes”. However, we refrained from making a public announcement of our tool during the conference so that our message would not be viewed as a commercial. Nevertheless, interested developers were generally deciding that it was far better to purchase a ready-made framework rather then create one themselves. Consequently, the SRP HTTP Framework has already been licensed to several developers in the community. They have been using this technology to produce REST-based APIs, thus extending their OpenInsight data and business logic into the web, mobile apps, and third-party integration.

With the recent release of the SRP HTTP Framework v3, we are ready and excited to advertise this product to the general public. We have special pricing for existing SRP FrameWorks customers. Visit the product information site for further details. In addition to providing complete documentation through our wiki site, we also offer step-by-step guidelines for installing the framework, testing for success, and creating your own REST APIs. Finally, support can always be found in our dedicated SRP HTTP Framework discussion page.

We thought it was also fitting at this time to make available the PowerPoint document used in the OpenInsight as a REST API Engine, What You Should Know presentation. While this does not enable us to replicate the live demo that was given, it should provide enough content to help the curious better understand the history and value of REST. In future blog articles, we will explore some of the capabilities of the SRP HTTP Framework and offer how-to tips on implementing commonly requested features such as OAuth2.