An IWC api resource (commonly referred to as a "node"), is some api accessed value. The IWC stores these shared values and metadata pertaining to them internal to the browser.
Throughout this book, "resource" may also be used in the context
of an IWC client. In this instance resource is a string containing the path
information to the data inside of the IWC. For example a client may gather
data api resource "/foo" (string of path), in which the IWC internals
takes "/foo" as the key to access the data/metadata.
An IWC api reference is a generated object of functions that provides
the application functional access, actions, to said resource.
To generate a reference, use the Reference constructor of the desired API
on the IWC client:
var fooRef = new iwc.data.Reference("/foo");
The object fooRef now contains a set of functions to access/modify the data api
resource /foo. The important point to understand is fooRef is not the value
of /foo, it is used to modify /foo with its functions. This is because
the IWC centralizes all of its resources in the browser so each client
connected to the bus can utilize them.
An action is a request for the IWC to perform some functionality for a given resource.
get action requests the IWC to retrieve the value of an api's resource.set action requests the IWC to store the value of an api's resource.There is a common set of actions that all IWC api's must adhere to understanding.
An api may deny an action request if it see's fit. For example a read-only
resource in the Names Api may deny a reference's use of a set action.
While the various IWC APIs are covered in the following section, lets consider a resource of the Data API.
This naming structure is used because when the IWC Bus is created, if connected to a backend, it pulls in persistent nodes for each API. To retain a URI based structure, the name assigned to the node is its relative path to its API endpoint. In other words, if the IWC bus is configured to gather its Data API nodes for a user from http://localhost:13000/api/data, the "/foo" resource is gathered from http://localhost:13000/api/data/foo.
This resource naming scheme is important for the Data API because it can persist nodes, thus needs to know its path to save the node to.
All IWC APIs follow this scheme for future capability enhancements and standardization.