Design and Implementation of a RESTful Notification Service

Scalability was not an important issue in the history of Internet when there were fewer users, so standalone applications performed well for the most part. With the rapid growth of mobile applications or web services, most users are using the same application or service at the same time which leads to the need to scale applications. To enlarge the capability of handling concurrent requests, the server-side push technologies were then introduced in recent years. There are two famous protocols or frameworks used today, and they are the Pub/Sub protocol, and Ajax Push Model. These two mechanisms are complex to use, and heavy-weight for application developers. To simplify the development and enlarge the ability to accommodate the growth of amount of application users, a RESTful notification service is proposed in this paper. The notification service leverages the event-driven characteristic of JavaScript, and pushes response data asynchronously to different requests. Based on the RESTful software architecture style, the proposed notification service is not only a lightweight system but also has impressive performance.