Rest { Space

Rest Spacex is a toolkit and platform for building and integrating all the server functions you need for a website or mobile app, without writing code. Taking a unique, novel and with-the-web approach, it aims to drastically accelerate and simplify this process, saving you rebuilding the same functionality in slightly different variations every time you create an application.

Essentially what Rest Space does is provide you with a website where you can both read and write data to its urls. You can configure different parts of your website to do that in different ways, so one part could handle image files, another data stored as JSON, another HTML templates. You can control the security of these different parts (or Subspaces) independently. You can also configure Plugins to expose service APIs in other parts of the website. These can then make use of data set up elsewhere, e.g. the authentication API can utilise user records stored as JSON in another part of the website.

Rest Space also provides a front end for your back end. This lets you log in and manually read and edit, upload and download the data in your Rest Space site. You can edit JSON via a form built automatically according to the structure of the data: this is the functionality of a CMS. However, it also allows you to view and download data written to Rest Space by any application it is serving. So it also provides the functionality of an admin interface.

Because Rest Space goes entirely with the grain of the web by operating with the principles of REST, it is easy and natural to both build and make use of its functionality. Because Rest Space plugins are just NPM packages, they are easy to write and publish, enabling an ecosystem of API sharing and reuse.

To give you a sense of how flexible and powerful this approach is, here are some of the Subspaces and Plugins we want to provide:

Subspaces

• Read and write JSON files associated with JSON Schemas
• Read and write JSON Schemas
• Read and write HTML templates (using Mustache)
• Read and write image files with image processing specified in the query string
• Read and write document files

Subspace overlays (these add functionality to an existing subspace)

• Search functionality
• Simple query functionality
• Composer: combine JSON files and HTML templates from other subspaces and render output HTML
• Zapier connector

Subspace underlays (these change the service used to provide a subspace functionality)

• S3 file storage
• Mongo Db
• Elasticsearch
• SQL Server

Plugins

• Authentication (always present)
• Emails
• PDF Generation
• Payments
• Postcode lookup

An initial version of Rest Space is in use now, but it needs its features built out and to be made into a SaaS. Help us achieve this and be kept up to date by giving us your email below: