Treat any storage backend as a Solid pod
Solid-Rest translates Solid requests into backend requests and backend responses into Solid responses. This means that any storage system that has a Solid-Rest plugin may be treated as a pod. Currently there are plugins for file and dropbox which means that any app that uses Solid-Rest can address file:// and dropbox:// URIs the same way as a Solid pod https:// URI and expect the same responses with some exceptions : permissions are not handled by Solid .acls, they are based on the underlying file or cloud permissions; collaborative tools such as chat are not available. These backends can now be addressed with most Solid libraries (e.g. rdflib) and apps (e.g. the databrowser).
Plugins for ssh, in-memory storage, in-browser storage (indexedDB, localStorage, Native File API) are in development.
Although Solid-Rest can be used stand-alone, it is best used in conjunction with other libraries, especially Solid-Node-Client, a nodejs client for Solid. Solid-Node-Client comes preloaded with the Solid-Rest-File plugin, so it will be transparently included in anything using that library.