The web service interface in coreBOS is a simple, powerful, and secure operation oriented application programming interface (API) to work with entities stored in the application which tries to provide an easier way to integrate with other software systems.

To understand this documentation, you should have a basic familiarity with software development, Web services, and the coreBOS application.

In other words, the application has an HTTP based, operational REST protocol (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Representational_State_Transfer) API. This software architecture defines a consistent and secure way to access the majority of the information contained in our coreBOS.

Consistent, because with a small set of commands we can access all the entities in the system, not only the base modules but also any new modules created following the vtlib rules.

Secure, not only because it has implicit user validation, but also because all the web service functions will apply the role and privileges system defined in the application to the information returned by this interface.

The REST protocol is a web-based protocol similar to SOAP but with a more standard and limited set of commands to work with. It defines a small set of commands with which we are supposed to be able to implement all the necessary actions that could be done. In this way, it is much easier to learn than SOAP, which requires different commands for all the operations and easier to maintain the new code on both sides of the communication. Although we diverge from a pure REST interface this idea of web service implementation has extended the official REST definition and added some features that are part of the coreBOS way of working and also given us an easy way to extend it even more if needed.