The last two videos I prepared for the "REST in Delphi 2010" white paper for Embarcadero Technologies are focused on the development of DataSnap applications integrated with WebBroker and the respective jQuery clients. One of the ideas of writing REST servers, in fact, is to make it possible to call them from any language, including JavaScript running in the browser. I think this is a very good fit for a Delphi backend, rather than trying to let the Delphi application produce HTML pages.
From the white paper:
With the growing number of public REST servers, with the emerging of cloud-computing, with the growing interest for web hosted applications, Delphi can play a significant role both in the development of rich user interface clients calling into remote servers and in the development of actual servers for manipulating data structures in a client application (written in any language) or directly in the browser.
As the final demos showed, combining JavaScript and a Delphi REST server you’ll be able to use the Embarcadero IDE for the development of professional, high-quality, and modern web based applications.
The first video introduced the DatSnap + WebBroker intergration with a simple example:
The second video is focused on editing, by supportign all four HTTP methods (get, put, post, delete), and on showing database data on a web page.
The white paper has been adapted from my coming Delphi 2010 Handbook, which will have a specific chapter on REST, including alternative techniques for the development of REST server side applications. More on the book in the coming days. It is likely that I'll start selling an ebook with the first part of the material next Monday.