Skip to main content

ColdFusion 10: HTTP Content Negotiation + REST– Part 2

Following with my previous post on how content negotiation between the client and server help in invoking an appropriate REST service. In this post I’ll explain how one can specify multiple mime types in the request header and also the quality factor that enables server to decide which mime type to serve for the incoming request. The client sends a HTTP request to the Server along with several headers, one of them is the Accept header. The Accept header can contain a list of mime types that the client (user agent) is willing to process. These mime types are separated by a comma and may optionally be combined with the quality factor.

A CFC can contain several methods with produces attribute set to a specific mime type. The Accept header may contain several mime types:

text/html, text/plain, application/xml, application/json, */*

Server would parse the Accept header and will search for a REST service that matches the mime type specified first in the Accept header list. In this case ‘text/html’, if the same is not found then the next one in the list – text/plain. The client would specify the order of preference in the Accept header.

The Accept header can also specify the quality factory along with the mime types which defines relative degree of preference between different mime types. Here the header will be of the form:

text/html;q=0.7, text/plain;q=0.8, application/xml;q=0.9

Here the preference for each of the mime types is specified as quality factor in the header. The method with produces attribute set to ‘application/xml’ would be invoked because its quality factor – 0.9 is higher than the other mime types. By default the quality factory is 1 and it can have values between 0 and 1.

A REST request can also be sent through a browser by providing the URI in the address bar. Here the browser would send the default Accept header and an appropriate REST service would be invoked. Therefore if you try to send the same request from two different browsers, it would return different results.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Adding beforeRender and afterRender functions to a Backbone View

I was working on a Backbone application that updated the DOM when a response was received from the server. In a Backbone View, the initialize method would perform some operations and then call the render method to update the view. This worked fine, however there was scenario where in I wanted to perform some tasks before and after rendering the view. This can be considered as firing an event before and after the function had completed its execution. I found a very simple way to do this with Underscore's wrap method.

De-obfuscating javascript code in Chrome Developer Tools

I had blogged about JavaScript debugging with Chrome Developer Tools  some time back, wherein I have explained how these developer tools can help in debugging javascript code. Today Google Chrome 12 was released and my Chrome browser was updated to this version. As with every release, there have been some improvements made on performance, usability etc,. One feature that stood out for me is the ability to De-obfuscate the javascript code. What is Minification? Minification is the process of removing unnecessary characters such as white spaces, comments, new lines from the source code. These otherwise would be added to make the code more readable. Minifying the source code helps in reducing the file size and thereby reducing the time taken to download the file. This is the reason why most of the popular javascript libraries such as jQuery are minified. A minified jQuery file is of 31 KB in size where as an uncompressed one is about 229 KB. Unfortunately, debugging minified javascript f

On GraphQL and building an application using React Apollo

When I visualize building an application, I would think of using React and Redux on the front-end which talks to a set of RESTful services built with Node and Hapi (or Express). However, over a period of time, I've realized that this approach does not scale well when you add new features to the front-end. For example, consider a page that displays user information along with courses that a user has enrolled in. At a later point, you decide to add a section that displays popular book titles that one can view and purchase. If every entity is considered as a microservice then to get data from three different microservices would require three http  requests to be sent by the front-end app. The performance of the app would degrade with the increase in the number of http requests. I read about GraphQL and knew that it is an ideal way of building an app and I need not look forward to anything else. The GraphQL layer can be viewed as a facade which sits on top of your RESTful services o