Rosco

Installation:

npm install rosco

Simple Echo Server Example

var Rosco = require('rosco');

// Create server instance
var app = new Rosco();

// Register a single method for RPC calls
app.register('echo', function(payload, callback) {
  console.log('executing echo');
  callback(null, payload);
});

Why?

RESTful APIs come in all different shapes and sizes today. The W3C has clearly defined the uses of the different HTTP methods, but that does not mean people use them at intended. It seems like every development team comes up with their own standards for when/where to use PATCH vs PUT etc. These small vagaries lead to wasted time for:

• developer ramp up on a new team
• arguments about which HTTP method should be used where
• learning a particular API's REST style

The hope of this project is to combine the best of both worlds from RESTful and RPC. The main advantage of RESTful APIs is the lack of state between calls. In contrast the problem with RPC is that many of its protocols track state between calls. Where RPC shines is the cognitive simplicity of its model. You register methods that can be invoked across systems. The building blocks of your services then become the functions available to be called. Much simpler than the layers of routes, url parameters, query parameters, and request bodies that have to be defined, parsed, and validated. In the RESTful paradigm it seems like we are constantly re-solving the same problems.

The simplicity of calling a method on a remote server can remove the cognitive and development overhead of our current RESTful APIs (soo much boilerplate). While having these method invocations follow REST's stateless model we remove the major downside to RPC. RPC over HTTP then can provide an existing protocol to follow when implementing this hybrid. The only omission being a reference id for the job invoked.