RESTful web service and OpenStack dashboard

In the past three weeks, I have worked on the task of developing a RESTful web service and integrating it to OpenStack dashboard. In this post, I will share some knowledge about them and also the tools (i.e. Flask framework, Flask RESTful framework) that help me finish this task. 

Nowadays many people benefit from the convenience of cloud computing services on OpenStack, Amazon Web Services, and many other cloud providers. Some may wonder how I get the service like a virtual machine by just clicking several buttons in the browser. This relies on the technique of RESTful web service.

In the concept of RESTful web service, everything can be categorized as either a resource or an operation/method on a resource. A resource is represented by a URI. And there are four kinds of operations on a resource, namely, GET, POST, PUT, and DELETE. The operation is done by HTTP request. In RESTful web service, a response to a HTTP request is serialized data in format of JSON or XML, which makes the information transportation between machines efficient.

To learn more details about RESTful web service, many online tutorials can be referred to. When I started to study this concept, I read lots of posts. And I have found the following mapping way is helpful. For people who have object-oriented (OO) programming experience, the resource-oriented architecture of RESTful web service may be understood in the OO paradigm. In OO, there are only objects and methods on objects, where an method on a object may be done by another object. But note that the work mechanism of RESTful web service and OO are very different. The former is done through HTTP request, while the latter is just a programming paradigm.

Because there are many repetitive works involved in the web application and service development, many frameworks are created to do those repetitive works automatically for developers. So the developers can only focus on their own parts. The frameworks Flask and Flask RESTful have helped me develop RESTful web service. I chose these two frameworks because I found that they were fairly easy to learn and use, and suitable in my case, after exploring other Python web frameworks like Django and Django REST. Another difference between Flask and Django is that the developer is allowed to choose their own object relational mapper (ORM) in Flask, while Django provides the default ORM. At the moment, I feel more comfortable using SQLAlchemy as ORM in the development. Their documentations provide the code of the example project to help get started. So the example code will not be provided here. Note that as mentioned in Flask RESTful documentation, the python package requests can serve as an easy way to test whether RESTful web service or URIs work as expected.

After RESTful web service is developed and ready for use, a user-friendly front-end dashboard will also be desired not only by users but also by administrators. Because the RESTful web service in my case is related to OpenStack, the OpenStack dashboard is customized to host it, considering the fact that system administrators and users always want to do everything in just one dashboard. To figure out how to integrate an external web service to OpenStack dashboard, I have mainly referred to two posts from Keith and OpenStack tutorial respectively, which answer most of my questions.

For people who want to develop their own front-end dashboard, the knowledge of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript will be required. HTML is in charge of the content of a webpage. CSS is in charge of the style of a webpage. And JavaScript makes a webpage more interactive. I don't have many experiences to share on this aspect. But I believe as long as we know what we want to achieve, we will find the bridge to it.