Technique for finding rest resources using an n-ary tree structure navigated using a collision free progressive hash

Abstract

The present invention discloses a data structure which, given an identifier for a Representational State Transfer (REST) resource, can rapidly yield a configured target and simultaneously yield all configured pattern based rules and constraints for the target. The disclosed data structure is a tree structure including nodes for URL portions. Each node is associated with a hash tree specifically grown in a manner that ensures collision occurrences are non-existent. The tree structure is effectively two or more superimposed trees; one for URL pattern matching to determine a target, another for determining constraints. A single tree traversal, which can be based on a progressive hash, can be used to concurrently determine a target and a set of constraints, which represents improved performance over conventional implementations that require multiple, distinct query/response operations to produce equivalent results.