RESTful Rails Development

Preface

This book is focused on designing and developing Representational State Transfer (REST) platforms in Rails. REST is the architectural style of the Web, consisting of a set of constraints that, applied to components, connectors, and data elements, constitute the wider distributed hypermedia system that we know today: the World Wide Web.

There are a few good reasons why it makes more sense to build platforms instead of just products or applications. Platforms are like ecosystems interconnecting different applications, services, users, developers, and partners. Platforms foster innovation through the inputs of their direct collaborators. By providing application programming interfaces (APIs) and software development kits (SDKs), platforms are more customer driven. Another reason for building platforms instead of just applications is that the Web is slowly but surely changing from a model in which a human reader would browse some content on web pages, to a model in which services and clients (not necessarily humans) exchange information. This was certainly, although only partially, what Tim Berners Lee envisioned in 2001 in his famous Scientific American article, “The Semantic Web.” The Web is becoming more semantic. In the past, a software agent would not have been able to “understand” an HTML document. It could parse some parts of it, but it would not process whether that document was referring to a blog post or something else, like the London bus schedule.

We used to think ...