STORM-205 added REST API to Storm, but these API are only used to monitor/manage a topology. Users still have to submit a new topology through command line. We can design a new REST API to achieve this so that a client outside of a Storm cluster can submit and manage topologies remotely.

This is the API I have in mind:
/api/topology/:id (PUT)
In the body the user can specify the jar location and class name.

However, user still need to upload the jar to nimbus, for which we have two choices:
1) design an API to upload the jar (e.g. in base64) then reference the upload location in topology submission API:
/api/jarupload/:loc (POST)
2) make storm support hadoop file system so that we can upload the jar to HDFS then call the submission API.

Further we can add a button to storm UI, using which one can submit a new topology.