Introduction

This project, UriRegistry, aims to solve one (and only one) problem that can arrise when working with distributed systems. Is one of my resources being used somewhere? This can be especially important when we want to delete a certain resource. While in typical RESTful fashion, we cannot guarantuee a client that a certain resource will keep on existing indefinitely, it can be a good thing to let our end-users know that the resource is currently in use somewhere.

The basic idea is quite simple. Every application has an endpoint that can be used by clients to ask if a certain URI is in use in that application. The application replies if that is the case and if so with some information where that might be the case.

Finally, there’s a separate application, the UriRegistry, that can serve as a single point of access. To ensure that a client does not need to know all the applications that might be using one of it’s resources, we use a central registry. This central registry knows which URI is use in which application, queries the applications in questions, gathers and tallies the results and presents these to the client. The client itself only needs to know where the central registry is. The registry takes care of the rest.