RESTful Web Services

Chapter 7. A Service Implementation

It’s been a while since I presented any code. Indeed, coming up with the code is currently a general problem for REST advocates. Despite the simplicity of REST, right now there are few well-known services that show off its principles. The average web service has an architecture that combines elements of REST with the RPC style. This is changing, of course, and this book is part of the wave of change. Another problem is that many services seem trivial when exposed through resources, even though they’d look very impressive as SOAP/WSDL services. See Appendix A for a partial list of real RESTful services with enough moving parts to learn from.

Until recently, web frameworks made few concessions to the lucrative REST market. They focus on applications for web browsers, using only the GET and POST methods of HTTP. You can implement RESTful services with just GET and POST, but the limitation seems to encourage the RPC style instead. New frameworks for RESTful services are showing up, though, and existing frameworks are changing to accommodate REST fans. Django (Python), Restlet (Java), and Ruby on Rails all make it easy to expose resources that respond to HTTP’s uniform interface. I cover these frameworks in Chapter 12. In this chapter I use Ruby on Rails as a medium for demonstrating how to implement a real-world web service.

A Social Bookmarking Web Service

Back in Chapter 2 I introduced del.icio.us, a web site that lets you publicly post bookmarks, ...