HTTPRESTiä

HTTPRESTiä is an extension of the conventional HTTP protocol that integrates RESTful architectural principles with an enhanced set of features for asynchronous communication, real‑time data streaming, and built‑in support for machine‑neural networking. It was first proposed in a white paper by the European Research Institute for Distributed Systems in 2024 as a response to the growing need for lightweight, horizontally scalable services capable of handling high‑velocity IoT and edge‑device traffic. The name combines “HTTP” and “REST” with the Finnish suffix “‑iä”, indicating an inclusive, user‑centric approach.

The core of HTTPRESTiä lies in its datastream extension, which allows a single REST endpoint to serve both request/response and push‑based notifications over HTTP/3 multiplexing. Clients define a subscription clause in the initial request header, and the server continuously emits JSON‑structured events until the subscription is cancelled. This eliminates the need for separate WebSocket infrastructure for many use cases. Additionally, HTTPRESTiä introduces a lightweight message queue abstraction called RESTiä‑BQ, which enables opaque payload exchange with end‑to‑end encryption without compromising REST simplicity.

System developers can deploy HTTPRESTiä services on standard web servers such as Nginx or Apache, with optional support modules written in Go, Rust, or JavaScript. A reference implementation is available under a permissive MIT license, and it has already been adopted by several startup projects in the smart‑city sector. While the protocol remains open for community contributions, it does not yet have widespread acceptance among legacy API providers, which continue to rely on classic REST over HTTPS. Nevertheless, HTTPRESTiä is positioned as an innovative approach to unify synchronous and asynchronous web operations within a single, standards‑based framework.