R-Event: A RESTful Web Service Framework for Building Event-Driven Web

As the Web is becoming a communication and collaboration platform, there is an acute need for an infrastructure to disseminate real-time events over the Web. However, such infrastructure is still seriously lacking as conventional distributed event-based systems are not designed for the Web. To address this issue, we develop a RESTful web service framework, R-Event. It represents and encapsulates the structural elements of Event-Driven Architecture (EDA) into the infrastructure of REST (Representational State Transfer), the architectural style that underlies the Web. Our approach leads to an event-driven web consisting of 4 layers of RESTful web services. The R-Event framework implements the layers that are pivotal to the event-driven web. The core component of this framework is federated topic hubs that provide services for notification publication, subscription, delivery, tracking, and linking. The advantages and applications of this approach are presented and discussed, including the important features of addressability, connectedness, dynamic topology, robustness, scalability, and efficient notifications. A prototype system for presence driven collaboration is developed and the preliminary performance tests show that the proposed approach is feasible and advantageous.