JSON patch for turning a pull REST API into a push

Abstract

REST APIs together with JSON are commonly used by modern web applications to export their services. However, these services are usually reachable in a pull mode which is not suitable for accessing changing data. Turning a service from a pull to a push mode is therefore frequently asked by web developers that want to get notified of changes. Converting a pull API into a push one obviously requires to make periodical calls to the API but also to create a patch between each successive version of the data. The latter is the most difficult part and this is where existing solutions have some imperfections. To face this issue, we present a new patch algorithm supporting move and copy change operations. Our evaluation done with real industrial data shows that our algorithm creates small patches compared with other libraries, and creates them faster.