Research And Realization Of Web Application Based On REST And RIA

With the rapid development of the network, multimedia technologies, Web applications have become much lager and more complex, and the level of the user experience has become much higher. How to improve user experience, the efficiency of traditional software framework development, and how to make full use of the HTTP protocol, unified interface, reduce development complexity have become more challenging.The thesis firstly analyzes the most disadvantage of the traditional Web application development:server-centralized, that is, the server is responsible for everything. The disadvantage results in that the complexity of server development is much high and the increasing traffic.Moreover, standard three layer architecture:Web presentation layer, business layer, the persistence layer, which is adopted by traditional Web application based on HTML form, can't satisfy urgent needs of the modern Web about the user experience and so on.This thesis puts forward the Web application based on the REST of architectural style and the Rich Internet Applications (RIA) architecture scheme (short for: REST+RIA). The scheme separates the client and the server in its REST architecture so that make full use of the rich client technology. As a result, developers can explore more beautiful and practical interface elements to implement the presentation layer in the client and which will greatly improve the user experience. On the other hand, REST regards resources as the center and follows the rule that separate resources and resources representation so as to achieve the development efficiency, scalability and simplicity of this scheme.The thesis also gives more details about development process of REST+RIA, including the resources design of the server side, the communication design of the client side, RIA technology Flex and REST frameworks Ruby on Rails.In order to verify the feasibility of REST+RIA scheme, the thesis implements a prototype about a mobile mall system. The prototype adopts Rails as the server, which embodies the REST style and the agile development thoughts. Flex and traditional HTML page work as Web client so as to show the independence of the REST interface.As the last part of the thesis, the performance comparison between REST+RIA and the traditional one is given, including lines of code, traffic, load response, user experience, safety performance. Based on the comparison, the thesis draws its conclusion:the REST+RIA sheme can perfectly separate development concerns, achieve the parallel development at the front desk and server, reduce traffic, enhance the user experience, and facilitate agile development.