REST+T: Scalable Transactions over HTTP

Abstract

Restful APIs are widely adopted in designing components that are combined to form web information systems. The use of REST is growing with the inclusion of smart devices and the Internet of Things, within the scope of web information systems, along with large-scale distributed NoSQL data stores and other web-based and cloud-hosted services. There is an important subclass of web information systems and distributed applications which would benefit from stronger transactional support, as typically found in traditional enterprise systems. In this paper, we propose REST+T (REST with Transactions), a transactional Restful data access protocol and API that extends HTTP to provide multi-item transactional access to data and state information across heterogeneous systems. We describe a case study called Tora, where we provide access through REST+T to an existing key-value store (WiredTiger) that was intended for embedded operation.