March 2010
Intermediate to advanced
312 pages
7h 31m
English
Content preview from RESTful Web Services CookbookBecome an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
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Chapter 14. Enabling Discovery
When building RESTful web services, you need to address two kinds of discoverability. These are design-time discoverability and runtime discoverability. Design-time discoverability helps others design and build clients. It describes all the essentials that client developer teams and administrators need to know in order to build and launch clients. Runtime discoverability, on the other hand, helps maintain loose coupling between clients and servers and enables plug-and-play-style automation. Runtime discovery involves HTTP’s uniform interface, media types, links, and link relations. This chapter is about design-time discoverability.
Design-time discoverability simply means describing your web service in prose, whether such prose is generated by some tools or created manually by the designers or developers of the web service. Client developers can consult this prose to understand the “semantics” of the resources, media types, link relations, and so on, and implement clients.
This chapter discusses the following recipes:
- Recipe 14.1
This recipe illustrates what to document to help client developers learn about your web service.
- Recipe 14.2
Use this recipe to learn when and how to use the
OPTIONSmethod.
14.1. How to Document RESTful Web Services
The best way to promote design- and development-time discoverability is to unambiguously document the information needed to implement clients.
Problem
You want to know how to document your web service.
Solution
Fully describe ...
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O’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.Julian F.
I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.Addison B.
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I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.