Integrate 2015

One of the basic tenets of the REST paradigm is that resources are individually identified by URLs. REST APIs provide access to resources by HTTP operations such as GET and POST on those URLs. While this approach makes for a clean abstraction, it can be inefficient - an application that makes an HTTP request for each resource it wishes to act on may deliver a poor user experience, especially in a high latency environment such as mobile.

'Boxcarring' allows us to bundle multiple operations into a single HTTP call. For example, an application might POST a whole set of resource representations for creation. Resources carried in the boxcar can be independent, or form a tree of linked resources. This session will explore the boxcar approach, show an implementation in action, and discuss whether this can still be considered a RESTful approach.