Nexus OSS Core has more than 120 REST Resources published. And that number is just increasing with new Nexus Plugins. Not to mention Nexus Pro that comes with even more plugins and more REST resources.    Everything you do in Nexus, whether you use the Maven Nexus plugin or the Nexus UI, is interacting with a REST service that is available to you if you want to write your own customizations and scripts.   It has been this way since we started the project in 2007.  In this post, I’m going to discuss how this came to be, how Nexus was developed with REST in mind from the beginning.

Nexus: A Core of REST Services

When we started the Nexus project, I called it a “blind” application.  A “blind” webapp is one with no UI technology whatsoever built-in.   All it publishes is a few static files, and a REST API.   All of the UI that you see in Nexus is Javascript.   Your browser executes Javascript which, in turn, interacts with a set of services.   The only presentation technology on the server side is a trivial Velocity template used to render the initial “shell” of the page. Continue reading →