Announcing: mapguide-rest 0.6

Here's the first release of mapguide-rest

And a general disclaimer: This is still work-in-progress code that's not ready for production use. However, that shouldn't stop you from downloading this release and having a play around :)

I have a bunch of mapguide-rest related posts in the draft queue, but it helps to have an accessible release as a point of reference for these posts rather than tell you to get the latest git clone of mapguide-rest.

One thing that stands out in this release since the initial announcement is the introduction of integrated REST API documentation.

What? REST API documentation? Aren't RESTful APIs self-describing, self-documenting and all this other stuff?

That may be true in an ideal sense, but pragmatism trumps idealism. mapguide-rest is the GET/POST/PUT/DELETE to a set of well-crafted URLs variety of REST API. In such cases, it definitely helps to know the definitive list of allowed URLs you can make requests to and the documented parameters that are allowed for each URLs.

So this is what we've provided for you. The documentation can be accessed at the following URL:

http://yourservername/mapguide/rest/doc/index.html

But this isn't a static document.

It's a fully interactive one!

The interactivity allows you to fully explore the REST API in a very intuitive fashion.

All this was made possible with the use of the Swagger documentation framework. The API reference is built on a modified version of Swagger UI. I've found Swagger to be a wonderful tool for generating REST API documentation. The initial set up takes some effort, but the pay-off of the final result is so worth it!

So now that we have a release on the board, stay tuned for more about the GeoREST-style data publishing framework.

Download