Is possible REST with more complex computation

Question

I'm going to implement app and I try to understand how to do it. I will create simple Android client and send something (eg. id, some accessToken (from twitter) ...) to server (using REST). eg. https://www.xyz.com/ws/post/accessToken

I want know if I can do something like this:

Using accessToken server gets posts from twitter and create a new user with REST (POST) and on server side I will count similarity (using model) of new user and put him to some category or cluster, create keywords ... Then I will save this profile to DB.

When user send GET (eg with login or id) with REST server compare some texts with keywords from DB and creates JSON/XML. Then sent JSON/XML to android client.

So I have dilemma what to use. RPC or REST?? Because I have read that REST is about "data" and I need to do some actions/computations which I have described above.

Answer 1

There are no REST constraints on what computations a server can do when generating a representation for a resource. The perception that REST is all about data is a huge oversimplification of the notion of idea of resource identification.