RESTful Web Services

Chapter 8. REST and ROA Best Practices

By now you should have a good idea of how to build resource-oriented, RESTful web services. This chapter is a pause to gather in one place the most important ideas so far, and to fill in some of the gaps in my coverage.

The gaps exist because the theoretical chapters have focused on basics, and the practical chapters have worked with specific services. I’ve implemented conditional HTTP GET but I haven’t explained it. I’ve implemented HTTP Basic authentication and a client for Amazon’s custom authentication mechanism, but I haven’t compared them to other kinds of HTTP authentication, and I’ve glossed over the problem of authenticating a client to its own user.

The first part of this chapter is a recap of the main ideas of REST and the ROA. The second part describes the ideas I haven’t already covered. I talk about specific features of HTTP and tough cases in resource design. In Chapter 9 I discuss the building blocks of services: specific technologies and patterns that have been used to make successful web services. Taken together, this chapter and the next form a practical reference for RESTful web services. You can consult them as needed when making technology or design decisions.

Resource-Oriented Basics

The only differences between a web service and a web site are the audience (preprogrammed clients instead of human beings) and a few client capabilities. Both web services and web sites benefit from a resource-oriented design based on HTTP, URIs, ...