Writing a simple RESTful service

HTTP, as described in the previous recipe, can be used to provide communication between different computers. The architectural style where HTTP is used to exchange tasks and information between machines is called REpresentational State Transfer (REST). The applications that can be accessed via HTTP are called web services. As using HTTP for communication is straightforward on the client side as well as the server side, this is a very common method for providing cross-system communication.

Getting ready

In this recipe, we will present two approaches. The first one is a raw implementation of a web service using only the built-in Julia functions, including the standard package,Sockets.jl. In the second approach, we will use theJuliaWebAPI.jlpackage.This package should be installed along with ZMQ.jl, which will be used for handling the incoming requests. For testing purposes, we will use HTTP.jl.

The packages can be installed simply with the Julia package manager...