The previous two articles on RESTful services using RestLet and developing in JDeveloper 11g – First Steps with RestLet 1.1RC2 in JDeveloper 11g – restful services 101 and Extending the RestLet application with support for POST/PUT to create and update Resources – used a static data set as source for the Resources. For real world services that will not be your typical scenario. Usually a business service hiding a persistence layer sitting on top of a database or wrapping a web service (RESTful or otherwise) is the more logical publisher of resources.

In this article, we will see how we can leverage ADF Model – Data Control & Data Bindings – to hook up such a business service. ADF Model publishes a Data Control for each Business Service it exposes. Through the Data Control applications can get access to data collections and operations acting on that data. For the application consuming the Data Control there should be no difference whether the underlying business service is an ADF BC application module connecting to a relational database, an EJB doing something similar, a web service published in the SOA of the organization or a RESTful service out there on the internet. That is at least the theory.

In this article, I will create a very simple Data Control, really nothing more than a mock object: a Placeholder Data Control. I will create a Thing data type and expose through the Placeholder Data Control a collection of Thing objects. The benefit of this approach is that we can take look at how ADF model can be used for providing the foundation for our RESTful services without the need for implementing a real business service. In a subsequent article we should find that the code we now write for the placeholder data control will work for ‘real’  data controls as well. .... Read the rest of this entry »