RESTful Rails Development

Chapter 3. First Adventures in API Design

RESTful architectures follow a set of principles defining how agents can communicate by exchanging resource representations.

This set of general rules has created tremendous possibilities for applications to exchange streams of data and contribute to building a Web that is more open and accessible.

In the Dark Ages of the Web it was common to meet websites that would declare their preferred, or best supported, browsers. “This website is best viewed with <browser_name_and_version>” was a popular tagline to insert in your page.

It wasn’t only a matter of preferences. Every browser would parse and display HTML code differently, and some features wouldn’t work as expected. Although we have left the Middle Ages of the Internet (mostly), web developers continue to struggle to create web applications that behave consistently across a wide range of devices.

It is important to note that the Web was invented to make computers able to communicate with each other easily, so that humans and software agents alike could act on the information shared across the system. The Web, and subsequently REST, was therefore designed with the core principles of simplicity and uniformity repeated and implemented at different layers of its architecture.

Application Programming Interfaces

An API is an interface specifying how some software components should interact with each other. A RESTful API is therefore just a REST interface exposing some internal functionality ...