EDAA is a "style" of REST architecture. REST itself is very simple, there are multiple ways to approach the task of building a REST API to a product. The fundamental notion of EDAA was to identify and codify certain REST best practices with the goal that VMware product teams and others would approach the task of designing and building a REST API to their product in a consistent fashion. Without this body of work to inform and guide product teams, these teams would deliver REST APIs to their products that reflected a vast variety of possible approaches -- reducing the ease with which consumers could access the APIs from multiple products.

Why adopt the EDAA style of REST API design?

When a product team adopts the EDAA style of REST API design, the customers of that product realize several benefits:

  • The data and functionality embodied in the product is available through a simple, web friendly REST API. Software consumers of this API can be built, either as Mashups, Javascript web clients, Operating system resident (fat clients) programs written in various programming languages or even command line scripts using CURL.

  • The REST API to the product follows REST industry best practices.

  • The REST API to the product has a style very similar to other VMware products, allowing developers to learn EDAA once and then be very familiar with the REST API produced by many VMware products.