RESTful Web Services

Appendix A. Some Resources for REST and Some RESTful Resources

The World Wide Web is the largest distributed application ever created, consisting of billions of resources. I’ve spent this book showing you how to seamlessly integrate a few new resources into this global application. Now I’m going to create a few links of my own. This appendix is a bit of hypermedia that connects this book to other discussions of REST, and to real live web services.

Standards and Guides

These are just a few of the sites that have helped me make sense of the programmable web.

HTTP and URI

• The HTTP standard (RFC 2616).

• The URI standard (RFC 3986).

• The WEBDAV standard (RFC 2518), if you’re interested in extensions to HTTP’s uniform interface.

• The Architecture of the World Wide Web introduces concepts like resources, representations, and the idea of naming resources with URIs (http://www.w3.org/2001/tag/webarch/).

• Universal Resource Identifiers—Axioms of Web Architecture.

RESTful Architectures

• The Fielding dissertation: Architectural Styles and the Design of Network-Based Software Architectures.

• The very active rest-discuss mailing list.

• The RESTwiki.

• Joe Gregorio’s “REST and WS” compares the technologies of REST to those of the WS-* stack while showing how to create a RESTful web service interface; if you don’t care about the comparison part, try “How to create a REST Protocol” by the same author.

• Joe Gregorio has also written a series of articles on REST for XML.com.

• Duncan Cragg’s The REST Dialogues: This series ...