RESTful Rails Development

Chapter 1. From Hypertext to Hyperdata

In this chapter, we will start exploring the basics of REST and HTTP, beginning with some concepts of REST architectures and the role of hypermedia.

This will be an introductory chapter on the architectural foundation blocks of REST and how these map to the HTTP protocol.

REST and HTTP

The Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) protocol has a predominant role on the Web. It represents the only protocol designed specifically to transfer resource representations, to abstract over lower-layered transport protocols such as TCP or UDP, and to act as the primary application-level protocol for web components.

Everything Started with Hypertext

In the Appendix of this book you can find an introductory section on the HTTP protocol and hypertext. Although web programmers tend to be very familiar with the protocol, recalling some deep concepts can be useful when reasoning about RESTful programming.

Representational State Transfer (REST) architectures are a generalization of the WWW architecture based on the HTTP protocol, where the World Wide Web represents an Internet-scale implementation of RESTful architectural style. In RESTful architectures agents implement uniform interface semantics, instead of application-specific components, implementations, and protocol syntax. 

REST therefore represents an abstraction of the actual architecture of the Web, in a similar way to how the Web itself represents an abstraction of HTTP. REST is mostly a model of how ...