Availability (contact me):
Whilst the vendor tools (U2RWD, UO Pooling and MVIS) do a great job of providing the nuts and bolts for creating RESTful services,
when it comes to working in the real world there is so much more to delivering a scalable and supportable solution.
mvREST provides an enhanced middleware layer and a back end framework to get you up and running with everything necessary
to build your web sites, so that you don't have to invest the time reinventing the wheel.
More than REST
REST is the de-facto standard for surfacing your MultiValue application to the web or for feeding information to partner systems.
But it is also opaque and your working methods can be difficult to test and debug without the end to end calls, where they are hidden
behind the client side connection.
For UniBasic developers, working with JSON can be long winded and difficult, given the verbosity of UDOs, and the vendor array mapping
too limited to serve.
With current generation tools like U2RWD you are in the hands of the vendor when it comes to support for the latest standards such as
changes to CORS; and information on the call (verb, cookies, http headers) is not visible from the server.
mvREST extends the vendor-supplied tools with the additional capabilities you need for supportability, deployment and ease of use.
Extended Middleware
The C# middleware provides the end point for your application, forwarding requests to RESTful services
or leveraging UO connection pooling, whilst delivering a range of additional services to improve scalability and ease of use,
including caching of static data to reduce the server load, integrated authentication through LDAP, broadcast facilities using SignlR,
improved CORS handling and more.
As new vendor solutions appear, this additional layer allows you to swap in and out the best of the current middleware
protecting your investment on both sides.
Visible and Supportable
For improved support the framework offers capture, replay and journaling so you can test and re-run your code in isolation
on the server, watching for error messaging and adding break points: essential for problem solving without the
black box effect of debugging standard REST services alone. Logging and auditing are naturally included.
Back end Framework
At the back end, the mvREST framework provides a single model for calling UniBasic or Python routines using flexible
method definitions.
mvREST Methods are mapped to UniBasic subroutines or Python classes that can be easily tested and version controlled in isolation,
and of which hugely simplifies deployment.
The inbuilt REST dispatcher and tools automatically handle security and session management using a flexible tag-based model
that can be attached to users and to methods or accessed from within your code, removing one of the major headaches when converting
your solution to the web.
mvREST works for your developers, generating metrics for performance, offering extended maps for converting between
dynamic arrays and JSON formats so they can elect to process requests and return results using regular MultiValue formats,
and managing the 'webification' so they can concentrate on writing high quality regular subroutines and/or Python code.
mvREST is an evolving framework, so please contact me to find out how mvREST can simplify your web development and short cut the work that is inevitably required to bring your application to the web.
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