Welcome to the COAST website
The World Wide Web evolved from humble beginnings to become a cornerstone
of almost all facets of modern society, embracing activities as diverse as finance, communications, entertainment, and commerce. Our research lab has made fundamental contributions to the design and evolution of the Web, including Roy fielding’s definitions of the Representational State Transfer (REST) architectural style and
the HTTP/1.1 protocol, Professor Jim Whitehead’s WebDAV distributed authoring mechanisms, Rohit Khare’s ARRESTED family of REST-derived styles, as well as Fielding’s work on the Apache Web Server and Justin Erenkrantz’s work on the Subversion configuration management system.
As Web technologies evolved, however, innovations like Ajax, mashups, and Web Services pushed web applications beyond the REST constraints, which provided theoretical and practical guidance to system developers. Justin Erenkrantz, Girish Suryanarayana, and Ph.D. student Michael Gorlick (R. Taylor, advisor) responded to this disparity by articulating a set of theoretical principles called Computational REST (CREST), which explained and extended the emerging importance of computational activity and transfer—as opposed to content exchange—between clients and services.
Through initial exploratory prototyping, it became clear that CREST was not merely an explanatory mechanism for newer Web applications, but a distinct architectural style suitable for novel resilient, adaptive and decentralized systems. In the summer of 2008, Erenkrantz and Gorlick, along with ISR Ph.D. students Yongjie Zheng and Alegria Baquero (R. Taylor, advisor to both), built a dynamic, adaptive feed reader, in which lightweight data processing widgets can be graphically reconfigured on-the-fly to perform collaborative data extraction and display on news feeds. Justin Erenkrantz graduated with the dissertation "Computational REST: A New Model for Decentralized, Internet-Scale Applications" in September, 2009.
Our previous work on CREST evolved into COmputAtional State Transfer (COAST), which provides more detailed principles founded on computational exchange to support the design of openly secure decentralized applications. Since then, Michael Gorlick has been at work exploring the implications of the COAST principles and building a new generation of infrastructure to support more sophisticated forms of computational exchange. Former Ph.D. student Kyle Strasser built COASTcast, an application for sharing and manipulating real-time decentralized HD video streams. COASTcast demonstrates that COAST can be used to distribute real-time data throughout a service topology that may be dynamically reconfigured via computation exchange. COASTcast implements high-definition video streams, from camera to display, as collaborating video services. A single stream may cross multiple organizations: the source (real-time HD video cameras), midpoints (encoders, decoders, and publication/subscription relays), and sinks (user interfaces and displays) may reside and be moved across many distinct islands, each potentially managed by a separate organization.
Our research effort continues on envisioning and developing exploratory applications that allow the investigation of common design patterns, methods for system design, notations to describe COAST systems, and the need for further infrastructure features and tool support. Current exploratory projects include collaborative video-tagging and real-time video editing, a platform for recasting service-oriented architectures and Web Services in e-commerce, situational awareness services, and securely open healthcare systems.