Representational state transfer (or REST) is a style of software architecture for web services that has been getting a lot of attention lately. We have used REST principles to create the GeoServer remote configuration API, and the next step is to also apply those principles to the access and editing of features.
This should provide an alternate interface to WFS-T that is much easier for web developers to understand, making GeoServer a more attractive platform for mash-ups nad agile development. It will not replace the OGC standard interfaces, but will complement them.
There are already a number of precedents for RESTful feature access, done by FeatureServer, MapGuide and MapFish. GeoServer should collaborate with them to come up with a common protocol that all clients can make use of. There has been some initial work on a RESTful structure for features so they could be crawled by Google's GeoSearch. The next step is to flesh out all the interfaces, and then to explore editing and versioning through the REST API.
Funding
This roadmap item is currently unfunded.
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Other Roadmap Items
Funded: GeoServer is now compliant with the latest WMS standard.
Currently features are only accessible via the Web Feature Service (WFS) API. REST feature access will provide a ”resource oriented“ approach to accessing geographic collections. It will also use the existing AtomPub specification to provide for feature viewing and editing.
Integrated Web Processing Service (WPS)
Funded: A WPS in GeoServer will be integrated into GeoServer 2.1 to perform real operations at the level of the data instead of relying on parsing GML or reading large raster files over the network like the standalone WPS implementations.