vRealize Operations API clients implement a REST workflow, making HTTP requests to the server and retrieving the information they need from the server’s responses.
About REST
REST, an acronym for Representational State Transfer, describes an architectural style characteristic of programs that use the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) to exchange serialized representations of objects between a client and a server. In the vRealize Operations API, these representations are JSON or XML documents.
In a REST workflow, representations of objects are passed back and forth between a client and a server with the explicit assumption that neither party need know anything about an object other than what is presented in a single request or response. The URLs at which these documents are available often persist beyond the lifetime of the request or response that includes them.
REST API Workflows
Application programs written to use a REST API use HTTP requests that are often executed by a script or other higher-level language to make remote procedure calls that create, retrieve, update, or delete objects that the API defines. In the vRealize Operations REST API, these objects are defined by a collection of XML schemas. The operations themselves are HTTP requests, and so are generic to all HTTP clients.
To write a REST API client application, you must understand only the HTTP protocol, and the semantics of JSON or XML, the transfer format that the vRealize Operations API uses. To use the API effectively in such a client, you must become familiar with the following concepts.
- The set of objects that the API supports, and what they represent.
- How the API represents these objects.
- How a client refers to an object on which it wants to operate.
The API reference includes a complete list of API requests. See About the Schema Reference.
