Developing Mashup Service applications using the REST interface

You can develop IBM® Cognos® Mashup Service applications that use the representational state transfer (REST) interface. REST is a lightweight interface that uses HTTP requests to communicate with the IBM Cognos Analytics server. This interface has a low overhead when dealing with large amounts of data.

The REST interface uses HTTP requests to communicate with the IBM Cognos Analytics server. The sample REST programs included with the Mashup Service use the XMLHttpRequest API to implement this communication. This API allows JavaScript programs to send HTTP requests directly to a server and to load the server responses into JavaScript objects. For simplicity, the REST code in this guide use HTML form GET action URLs to communicate with the BI server.

Creating a Mashup Service application includes the following steps common to all applications.

• Logging on and logging off
• Running Mashup Service methods
• Retrieving report data

Additional topics are covered in Performing additional tasks using the Mashup Service.