RESTful Web Clients

Preface

“The beginning is the most important part of the work.”

Plato

Web-based REST and hypermedia services are getting more common every day but there are very few client libraries that take advantage of these powerful API features. This is mostly because the techniques and patterns needed to create successful hypermedia clients have been ignored. Yet, when done right, hypermedia-based client applications exhibit more stability and flexibility than typical one-off custom client code.

The aim of this book is to give developers both a solid background and a source of working examples that provide clear recommendations for dealing with hypermedia-style APIs. One of the key ideas in this book is that client applications should rely on something I call the Request, Parse, Wait loop or RPW. This is the way all computer games are implemented and it is the way all event-driven interfaces work from windowing-style workstations to reactive machine interfaces.

I’ve been told that some frontend developers might find the RPW model unusual; one person even characterized my recommendations as “radical.” I can understand that viewpoint. So many of the client libraries and practices today focus on designing specially built one-off user interfaces that are difficult to modify and have a hard time reacting to new information provided by services at runtime. However, after reviewing the examples in this book, I hope that frontend developers—most all of whom are much more skilled than I—will be ...