New in LiveCycle ES2 - REST endpoints

Many people are unhappy with the way the HTTP protocol was hijacked by proponents of SOAP without adequately leveraging what HTTP already offered. Some of them put their thoughts and feelings into a book (RESTful WebServices) in 2007 which has since become a bestseller. The original idea for REST (Representational State Transfer) came from a PhD dissertation by Roy Fielding, one of the authors of the HTTP Specification (RFC 2616).

The core idea is that if a web application is architected with enough effort and planning, clients (humans or programs) can invoke the services offered by that application with just the main methods of HTTP which are GET, POST, PUT and HEAD. Amazon's Simple Storage Service (S3) is the classic example. If you want to set an attribute for a file you are uploading to the S3 service, you do that by setting the value of an HTTP header as part of the HTTP PUT request to the S3 server.

In ES2, LiveCycle now automatically creates REST endpoints for orchestrations. If you can design your short-lived orchestrations in such a way that all input is programmatically picked up by actions within the orchestration, and if the output is a single document, you can invoke the orchestration and get its output by using just a web browser. The URL will look like this:
http://<server>:<port>/rest/services/<application_name>/<process_name>:1.0
where 1.0 is the version of the process.

Only HTTP GET and POST are supported.

Here's a real URL:
http://server.adobe.com:8080/rest/services/LiveCycleES2_Benchmark_app/Processes/LiveCycle_Benchmark:1.0
In the above example, http://server.adobe.com:8080/rest/services/LiveCycleES2_Benchmark_app is the path to the application 'LiveCycleES2_Benchmark_app', and
/Processes/LiveCycle_Benchmark:1.0 is the path to the orchestration. v1.0 of the orchestration 'LiveCycle_Benchmark' is under the folder 'Processes'.