Developing a Prototype of REST-Based Database Application for Shipbuilding Industry: A Case Study

This paper presents a case study of an application prototype for shipbuilding industry using RESTful web service. Majority of database applications for traditional enterprises are based on the two-tier with simple client-server or the three-tier with additional RPC middleware. Because the outdated old configuration is not extensible, an alternative is required to link the database to the Web or mobile platform. This type of modification on the legacy system causes large maintenance cost since the modified architecture can affect other parts of legacy system. Motivated by these issues, this paper proposes a simple and flexible application prototype utilizing open source frameworks and the RESTful web service. The prototype utilizes Groovy and Grails framework which is an open source web application framework on the Java platform. The major benefits of the proposed prototype are simply able to extend to heterogeneous client platforms such as mobile and .NET, and maintain by using high-productive web application framework. As a case study, the proposed prototype is applied to the management task of BOMs (Bill of materials) for shipbuilding.