RESTafarianism and EMF

I had the pleasure to share a drink and a chat last night with Ed Merks, the EMF Project lead. One of the interesting things that he brought up was his efforts to extend the EMF URIHandlers to be more REST-like. He mentions this in a blog entry - you will find the reference after the picture of the hibiscus. There are some more techcore details at the Bugzilla entry that hosts the patch.

This work is a big thing for EMF, in my opinion. Putting this together with a simple HttpService instance in an OSGi container can give you the basis for remotely manipulable models, with most of the work done by EMF itself. This opens up the field for Rich Internet Applications (blach - another buzzword) that can interact with hosted EMF models without having to depend on having an EMF library on the client side.

The Artix Repository product that IONA ships has done something very similar, but we have created the RESTful interactions outside of EMF. It's cool to see this kind of capability moving into the core.