Chapter 7

Using REST with Facebook and Twitter

It has been said that every generation of software developers reinvents remote procedure calls (RPC). There are probably hundreds of technologies that have been created to get one computer to run a function for another. Representational State Transfer (REST) might seem like just another new type of RPC—this generation's version—especially considering how popular it is these days. But that's not the case; REST is really a collection of guidelines for using the existing HTTP 1.1 protocol to communicate information between a client and a server.

In this chapter we will explore how REST takes advantage of the HTTP methods (POST, GET, and so forth), as well as statelessness and caching, to suggest a ...

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