RESTFace

REST content API service prototype.

Provides a consistent & performance-oriented REST API.

Usage

We are leveraging ES6 generators & promises, which means that node 0.11+ is required.

node --harmony restface

You can now benchmark the service with

ab -c10 -n10000 'http://localhost:8888/v1/enwiki/pages/foo/rev/latest/html'

On a single core & with a simple static 'hello world' backend, this currently yields around 7500 req/s. The routing & generator-based handler overhead is very low.

Implementation goals

• easy to register end point handlers without interfering with other handlers
• generic monitoring of all backend requests
  • backend perf / issue monitoring
  • know which handler initiated which requests
• robust even if there are faulty handlers
  • don't crash if there's a syntactical error in a handler
  • blacklist handlers that crashed or timed out often recently (fuse)
  • limit the time a single request can take, properly respond to client
• optimize for proxying use case
  • make it easy to forward request to backend with minor changes
  • typical handler action is handling 404s, retrying, combining content etc
  • handlers are not expected to perform CPU-intense computations
    • move those to separate services on separate machine / process

Handler interface

• Single file per handler in a directory
• require is wrapped in try/catch for robustness
• integrates routing and documentation

Architecture docs

See here.