Rest API HowTo Articles

Q: What is a Rest API ? (in general)

A RESTful API -- also referred to as a RESTful web service -- is based on representational state transfer (REST) technology, an architectural style and approach to communications often used in web services development.

Q: What is the iQSonar Rest API ?

The REST API allows users to query the iQSonar results directly using the web client protocol. The results are (with one or two exceptions) returned in JSON format.

The sample HowTo articles demonstrate use of the RestAPI using multiple scripting languages and the use of the API to perform a number of different types of queries.

Note on performance

The more network calls required to perform the queries, the longer the RestAPI will take to return results. When the script running the queries is on an end user computer communicating with iQSonar on one server which in turn queries an SQL server on a second server, the results will take measurably longer to return than if the iQSonar server, the database server and the script are all running on the same host. This is most noticeable in queries that make multiple API calls over large data sets.