RESTful Web Services Cookbook

Preface

In 2000, Roy Fielding, one of the key contributors to HTTP and URI, codified the architecture of the Web in his doctoral thesis titled “Architectural Styles and the Design of Network-Based Software Architectures.” In this thesis, he introduced an architecture style known as Representational State Transfer (REST). This style, in abstract terms, describes the foundation of the World Wide Web. The technologies that make up this foundation include the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP), Uniform Resource Identifier (URI), markup languages such as HTML and XML, and web-friendly formats such as JSON.

REST is an architectural style for networked applications. It consists of several constraints to address separation of concerns, visibility, reliability, scalability, performance, etc. See Appendix B for a brief overview of these constraints. What makes REST attractive to build distributed and decentralized client/server applications is the infrastructure of the Web. Deploying web services on this infrastructure lets you take advantage of a wide range of existing infrastructure that includes web servers, client libraries, proxy servers, caches, firewalls, and so on. Although, in theory, it is possible to build RESTful applications without relying on HTTP, attempting to do so can be an expensive proposition. In this book, RESTful web services means web services built using HTTP, URIs, XML, JSON, Atom, etc.

Scope of the Book

This book is not a discourse on REST or its merits over other ...