This series of posts seeks to define and demonstrate RESTful web services within a Resource Oriented Architecture. Most of this information is based on Leonard Richardson’s and Sam Ruby’s book “RESTful Web Services” 1 and Dr. Roy Fielding’s doctoral dissertation “Architectural Styles and the Design of Network-based Software Architectures – Chapter 5” and several of his other writings. 2, 3, 4, 5.
The culmination of this research is my RESTful Jazz Artist web service. You can try it out by navigating to the bookmark URI or a simple client side application that allows you to inspect the response header and XML data.
1.
Richardson, Leonard and Ruby, Sam. RESTful Web Services. Sebastopol: O’Reilly Media, Inc., 2008. Ebook
2. Fielding, Roy Thomas. Architectural Styles and the Design of Network-based Software Architectures. Doctoral dissertation, University of California, Irvine, 2000.
3. Fielding, Roy Thomas. REST APIs must be hypertext-driven. Untangled – Musings of Roy T. Fielding, October 20, 2008
4. Fielding, Roy Thomas, et. al. RFC 2616 – Hypertext Transfer Protocol – HTTP/1.1. The Internet Society, June 1999
5. “The problem is that just being connected is not enough. Yes, it is important, ...Read more »
and I’d love to have five or six different ways of explaining the parts of REST that are intended to help grow the Web. But hypertext as the engine of hypermedia state is also about late binding of application alternatives that guide the client through whatever it is that we are trying to provide as a service. It is fundamental to the goal of removing all coupling aside from the standardized data formats and the initial bookmark URI. My dissertation does not do a good job of explaining that (I had a hard deadline, so an entire chapter on data formats was left unwritten) but it does need to be part of REST when we teach the ideas to others.
I like the book’s emphasis on applying REST in practice and running through real examples. Dissertations are not so good for teaching people how to do something (other than to write more dissertations).”
Posted by Roy T. Fielding at 4:04:29 PM