RESTful Web Clients

Foreword

In the foreword to this book’s precursor, RESTful Web APIs (O’Reilly), Sam Ruby says:

Hopefully the pebbles that [RESTful Web APIs] kicks loose will have the same effect as its predecessor [RESTful Web Services] did. Who knows, perhaps in another seven years it will be time to do this all over again, and highlight some other facet of Representational State Transfer that continues to be under-appreciated.

Well, it hasn’t quite been seven years, but this is exactly where RESTful Web Clients comes in. Mike has quite the pedigree in the API space and, with this text, has brought his usual style of clarity, both in writing and in thought, to this oft-ignored part of web APIs.

Roy Fielding’s dissertation, Architectural Styles and the Design of Network-based Software Architectures, is the definitional text of REST. In the very first section, Fielding describes the seven essential architectural constraints that describe REST. The first one is called client–server, and is described like this:

Separation of concerns is the principle behind the client–server constraints. By separating the user interface concerns from the data storage concerns, we improve the portability of the user interface across multiple platforms and improve scalability by simplifying the server components. Perhaps most significant to the Web, however, is that the separation allows the components to evolve independently, thus supporting the Internet-scale requirement of multiple organizational domains.