Dell Unity™ Family Unisphere® Management REST API Programmer's Guide

Resource-oriented architecture and REST

REST is a client-server architectural style that uses the HTTP protocol in a simple, effective, way. REST is based on the following principles:

• Application state and functionality are organized into resources. Resources represent physical things, such as a specific Storage Processor (SP); logical things, such as a specific alert; or collections of entities, such as the physical disks in the storage system.
• Each resource has a unique Universal Resource Identifier (URI), and each resource instance has a unique ID. For example, you can identify the alert collection with this URI: /api/types/alert/instances. And you can identify the alert instance that has an ID of 201 with this URI: /api/instances/alert/201.
• Resources share a uniform interface between the client and server through standard HTTP protocol operations. The Unisphere Management API uses the HTTP GET operation to retrieve data about a resource collection or resource instance, POST to create or modify a resource instance, and DELETE to delete a resource instance. (The API also uses POST for a limited set of other operations to implement resource-specific actions ) Thus, an application can interact with a resource by knowing the URI pattern, resource identifier, and action required.
• Communication between the client and server occurs through HTTP requests and responses. In the Unisphere Management API, requests and responses represent resource data using JavaScript Object Notation (JSON).
• Each request is stateless, which means that the server does not store application state information. Instead, client requests contain all the information needed to service the request.
• Resources in a REST API are self-documenting. A response from the server contains information about the requested resource in the form of attribute names and values. Some responses also contain HTML links that the user can use to retrieve additional information about the resource.