Some REST Resources
Jun 27th, 2006 by phil
I was at RailsConf 2006 where DHH gave a great keynote on what amounts to REST principles. I had heard a lot about REST, but until DHH’s talk couldn’t really wrap my mind around the concept. Now that I have a better mental map of the REST concepts, I have been doing some research. Here is a list of resources that I have found in my research.
The HTTP Protocol
In order to understand REST, it is important to first have a solid understanding of the HTTP protocol.
- HTTP 1.1 RFC
- List of HTTP Methods
- Architecture of the World Wide Web, Volume One
- Design Issues for the World Wide Web
The REST Architectural Style
REST (Representational State Transfer) isn’t a technology but an “architectural style”, or pattern, based on the capabilities of the HTTP protocol.
- Roy Fielding’s doctoral thesis
- Wikipedia article on REST
- The REST Wiki
- The Restful Web
- Microformats.org REST page
- Paul Prescod’s list of REST resources
What Makes a Service RESTful?
There was an interesting discussion amongst bloggers about what made a RESTful service and what terminology was appropriate. Here are the three posts I found most interesting:
- Tim Bray - Styles: Beyond WS and REST
- Dare Obsanjo - Misunderstanding REST
- Jonnay - Hi-Rest and Lo-Rest, two broken halves of the tower of Babylon
Practical Applications
InfoQ has an article on using REST principles for .NET and Java interop. The method described in the article probably isn’t “pure” REST, but it is pragmatic and useful nonetheless. Sun has a page on building REST services with Java.
The Atom Publishing Protocol is supposed to be a good example of a RESTful API.
Ryan Daigle has a great overview of the new ActiveResource library for Rails.
