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Accessing Resources

In WSF, everything you can communicate with is a resource described by an URL1, or at least an URI2. Our URI class extends the standard JavaScript URL class with methods to operate on local and remote resources alike in a standardized way.

There is no real difference between loading a file from the local filesystem and accessing a document on a remote web server. But there is also no real difference between inserting a row into a table in an SQL database and storing a JSON document in a file, or sending an email to a mailing list. It's all just reads and writes to different kinds of resources.

The following operations are defined for URIs:

  • info: Returns metadata about the resource, (via stat() for local files or HEAD for HTTP resources, for example).
  • list: Returns metadata about the resource's children (like getting the content of a local directory).
  • load: Reads the resource and returns a parsed representation of it.
  • save: Writes something to the resource, possibly after having serialized the message into a sequence of bytes.
  • append: Like save, but appends the data to the resource instead of replacing it.
  • modify: Applies some kind of protocol-specific modification; for HTTP, this maps to a PATCH request.
  • remove: Removes the resource.
  • query: Issues a protocol-specific query to the resource and returns the response. Commonly used to query SQL databases.
  • watch: Starts listening for changes from the resource and generates a stream of change events. Can be used to watch the local filesystem, but also to read a change data feed from a database.
  1. Uniform Resource Locator↩
  2. Uniform Resource Identifier↩