restaf Introduction

restAF- Building Applications with SAS REST API made simple

SAS® Viya® is like a Swiss Army knife when it comes to allowing all types of clients to talk to it—Java, Python, Lua, R, and, of course, SAS®. In addition to using these language-based APIs, SAS also publishes APIs that conform to REST best practices. The well-designed APIs in SAS Viya make it relatively easy to build complex web and non-web applications with SAS Viya as the engine of your application. The applications can be solely based on SAS Viya capabilities or users can do a mashup of the advanced SAS Viya analytics with their other products and capabilities. restAF is a light-weight, UI-framework agnostic, JavaScript library designed to be easy-to-use for app developers. restAF takes advantage of the consistency of the REST APIs to reduce the responses from the server into a standard form, and it also manages the data on the client side. This reduction enables developers to interact with the server in a repeating pattern regardless of which service the application is using.

Use restAF to exploit SAS® Cloud Analytic Services (CAS), compute server, SAS® Visual Analytics, and other key capabilities of SAS Viya in a very consistent manner with minimal coding.

Introduction

The concepts and usage of restAF are explained through examples.

restAF makes writing applications with SAS REST API simple

• A small set of methods to make API calls
• Reduces the information to readily useable parts
• Manages the data for the application in a central store for one version of truth
• Short learning curve
• Results in productive application developers

With restAF, you focus on your application and not on the nitty-gritty details of setting up HTTP calls, processing the returned results and HTTP codes, parsing the returned payload, managing the data, and so on.

Key technologies

restAF uses three key libraries(among others) that you are probably familiar with.

1. redux-saga
2. immutable-js
3. axios

I am extremely grateful to the developers of these packages for their wonderful contributions.