Date of Award

2012

Document Type

Honors Thesis (Open Access)

Department

Colby College. Computer Science Dept.

Advisor(s)

Dale J. Skrien

Abstract

It is no secret the Internet has evolved at an alarming rate since its public debut in the early 90s. What began as a simple way for users to publish files has evolved into a platform for impressively complex interactive applications. Now, applications once restricted to a single operating system are made available to all through advancements in browser technology and libraries. For a long time, Adobe has offered Photoshop as a far from trivial image editing program for around $100 to the Windows and Mac platforms. Recently, a web application emulating Photoshop’s features has been made freely available to anyone with an Internet connection and a web browser, regardless of operating system. Not only are many of today’s websites complex, they also span much further than they were ever previously capable of. Websites such as Facebook extend tentacles across hundreds of thousands of websites in order to allow websites to update a user’s status or to ‘like’ content. With rapidly increasing complexity and adoption, it is more important than ever for developers to ensure longevity and scalability in their applications. The style in which developers write their applications is largely responsible for eliciting and maintaining these qualities. There is much written on tried and true architectural styles for network based applications and their employment is paramount in handling the dynamic nature of the web. This project, Blockstep, attempts to implement the golden standard of web architecture, Representational State Transfer (REST). Blockstep will employ a new, standards-track data format to be incorporated into the machine-readable part of this application.

Keywords

REST, application, Web

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