In addition to the ATG Web services functionality discussed in the preceding chapters, the ATG platform includes REST Web Services that expose the features in the ATG Adaptive Scenario Engine in a RESTful manner.
The ATG Adaptive Scenario Engine provides an open, server-side environment for building and deploying dynamic, personalized applications for the Web and other communication channels, such as email and wireless devices. The core of the platform is the Dynamo Application Framework (DAF), which implements a component development model based on JavaBeans and JavaServer Pages (JSPs). Developers assemble applications out of component beans (based on standard ATG classes or custom Java classes) by linking them together through configuration files in Nucleus, ATG’s open object framework. Page designers build the front-end interface for the application out of JavaServer Pages that use ATG’s DSP tag library. The DSP tag library makes it possible to embed Nucleus components in JSPs, and use those components for rendering dynamic content.
Traditionally ATG has used form handlers to process form input and JSP (JHTML) to handle page generation. The addition of RESTful web services allows customers to use popular technologies like Flash, Flex, PHP, and Python for page generation and form handling.
Note: The ATG Platform REST Web Services described in this section are not related to the SOAP-based web services described previously in this guide. The REST and SOAP modules do not share any functionality. You should not assume that anything which you may know about ATG SOAP Web Services will relate to ATG Platform REST Web Services. The two technologies were developed independently and are quite different in their implementations.
The ATG Platform REST Web Services allow developers to
Retrieve and change data in the server
Call public methods on Nucleus components
Call form handler functionality
Manipulate repository data including creating and deleting items
Use JSON or XML formats for sending or receiving data from the server
Filtering and alias properties
Use client side APIs written in Java and ActionScript to facilitate web services calls
The chapters in this section discuss how to use the ATG Platform REST Web Services functionality to communicate with an ATG server:
