RESTful Web Services

by Leonard Richardson

book data

55 ratings, 4.05 average rating, 12 reviews (more data...)

rating	frequency	%
5		32%
4		47%
3		12%
2		7%
1		0%

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published

May 8th 2007 by O'Reilly Media, Inc.

binding

Paperback, 446 pages

isbn

0596529260 (isbn13: 9780596529260)

description

"Every developer working with the Web needs to read this book." -- David Heinemeier Hansson, creator of the Rails framework

"RESTful W...more

[close] "Every developer working with the Web needs to read this book." -- David Heinemeier Hansson, creator of the Rails framework

"RESTful Web Services finally provides a practical roadmap for constructing services that embrace the Web, instead of trying to route around it." -- Adam Trachtenberg, PHP author and EBay Web Services Evangelist

You've built web sites that can be used by humans. But can you also build web sites that are usable by machines? That's where the future lies, and that's what RESTful Web Services shows you how to do. The World Wide Web is the most popular distributed application in history, and Web services and mashups have turned it into a powerful distributed computing platform. But today's web service technologies have lost sight of the simplicity that made the Web successful. They don't work like the Web, and they're missing out on its advantages.

This book puts the "Web" back into web services. It shows how you can connect to the programmable web with the technologies you already use every day. The key is REST, the architectural style that drives the Web. This book:<ul> <li>Emphasizes the power of basic Web technologies -- the HTTP application protocol, the URI naming standard, and the XML markup language</li> <li>Introduces the Resource-Oriented Architecture (ROA), a common-sense set of rules for designing RESTful web services</li> <li>Shows how a RESTful design is simpler, more versatile, and more scalable than a design based on Remote Procedure Calls (RPC)</li> <li>Includes real-world examples of RESTful web services, like Amazon's Simple Storage Service and the Atom Publishing Protocol</li> <li>Discusses web service clients for popular programming languages</li> <li>Shows how to implement RESTful services in three popular frameworks -- Ruby on Rails, Restlet (for Java), and Django (for Python)</li> <li>Focuses on practical issues: how to design and implement RESTful web services and clients</li> </ul> This is the first book that applies the REST design philosophy to real web services. It sets down the best practices you need to make your design a success, and the techniques you need to turn your design into working code. You can harness the power of the Web for programmable applications: you just have to work with the Web instead of against it. This book shows you how. [close]

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05/31/08

TK rated it:

bookshelves: semantic-web

Everything from OREILLY is of the highest quality. The book as you would expect is heavily biased toward REST versus an RPC architecture. I agree that one must read this book if they hope to understand all of the options in building scalable web-services.

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04/07/09

Dalebrayden rated it:

bookshelves: software, technical

Read in May, 2009

This is both a manifesto for what the authors term 'REST-Oriented Architecture' (ROA), and a technical dive into the mechanics and semantics of REST. It comes as a big breath of fresh air after years of being harangued by the putative benefits of Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) with its plethora of web-service standards centered on XML, SOAP, and WSDL, and the many competing and largely incompatible SOA toolkits.

REST (or ReST) stands for 'Representational State Transfer', a term ...more This is both a manifesto for what the authors term 'REST-Oriented Architecture' (ROA), and a technical dive into the mechanics and semantics of REST. It comes as a big breath of fresh air after years of being harangued by the putative benefits of Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) with its plethora of web-service standards centered on XML, SOAP, and WSDL, and the many competing and largely incompatible SOA toolkits.

REST (or ReST) stands for 'Representational State Transfer', a term and concept introduced by Roy Fielding nearly a decade ago. The basic idea is that, in current practice, the www consists in large part of interconnected resources where the connections are implemented by the basic HTTP methods of GET and POST, and resource representation is typically HTML, heavily annotated and marked-up, and difficult to work with programmatically. But HTTP, combined with suitably chosen URIs, and combined with more program-oriented representations such as XML and JSON, can provide us the combined advantages of the interconnected web and programmable 'services'.

In the ReST model the HTTP methods (GET, PUT, POST, DELETE, and maybe HEAD) are the only methods that would be exposed by a web 'service'. The service exposes URI (universal resource identifiers) for each of the resources provided by the service (a possibly unbounded set of resources), and the methods are applied to those URIs. Each resource can have one or many representations - for example, as XML, JSON, HTML, PDF, etc. There are multiple ways of selecting a representation: for example, adding an 'Accept' header to the HTTP request, or adding some kind of 'qualifier' to the basic URI (for example, a .xml or .pdf suffix).

Representations can (and in the view of the authors, should) provide links to related resources - in fact this ability to link to other resources is the source of much of the power and attractiveness of the ReST model. This ability to identify resources by URI sets ROA apart from SOA. As the authors note, an SOA application normally has few URIs, sometimes only one. So it is literally impossible for the result of a service call to identify the related entities (I can't call them resources) for that call. Instead, the client-side programmer must understand the documentation (possibly by poring over the service's WSDL description) to know how to accomplish any given task. Unless the service designers used great care, the service calls within the SOA application bear little relationship to one another, so understanding some portion of the API provides no great insight into the remainder of the API. The situation is (or can be) different in an ROA application: knowing the set of basic resource types gives immediate knowledge of how to access any particular resource instance. Knowing the relationships between resources (for example, which resources are containers, which resource types are related to other resource types) gives knowledge of how to 'navigate' the application - without the service provider having to document every detail of that navigation.

This is exciting stuff. But there are many challenges. At the low end of the scale, there is the issue that browsers know only the GET and POST methods - not DELETE, PUT, and HEAD. So POST has to be overloaded to provide the functionality of PUT and DELETE. At the top end of the scale, it is not clear in any given case what resources should be exposed and what their representation should be. We need a book entitled 'Resource Oriented Design Patterns' to fill this gap.

In the meantime, RESTful Web Services is a terrific guide to developing web applications.
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10/10/08

Ross rated it:

Read in November, 2008

recommends it for: Web Developers, Web Application Designers

Overall, I really liked this book. It has gotten me excited about REST and Resource Oriented Architecture as a driving force for the programmatic web. I would recommend this book to anyone interested in learning about those topics.

On the other hand, I found the author's use of the first person "I" to be somewhat jarring, especially the fact that they repeatedly felt the need to re-emphasize that the information presented was "only their opinion and not hard and fast ...more

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04/06/09

Ruquay Calloway rated it:

Read in January, 2008

recommends it for: web developers

A great resource that explains why - and how - to keep web services as simple and meaningful as possible. Web authors are encouraged to keep the Resource in URLs - those "things" we are interested in -, rather than cluttering the developer mindspace with an ever-growing pile of verbs and extra protocols.

Having developed with REST style as well as Big Web Services, this book made it clear to me just why I prefer the former.

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02/29/08

Fogus rated it:

bookshelves: 2008_read

Read in March, 2008

REST REST REST. Everyone is talking about RESTful webservices, and there is some merit to the discussion. This was a very well thought out book and presented the REST topic in a sensible light. The only problem that I had was that the book could have been written in 200 pages, maximum. Aside from that, it is worth a read, especially if you want to learn more about REST and its philosophy. In a nutshell, REST involves taking a webservice that looks like

http://domain.com/service?target=somethi......more

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04/08/09

Maoxs is currently reading it

bookshelves: currently-reading

Very good book

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04/02/09

Lily is currently reading it

bookshelves: currently-reading

Very good book for web service

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10/29/07

Chip Turner rated it:

Read in July, 2007

not bad, but REST probably doesn't need a whole book. anything that has examples in 3+ languages is just trying to make a broad topic seem practical. nice coverage of what works and doesn't work, though, and general design suggsestions

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01/28/08

Ira Burton rated it:

bookshelves: computing

Read in January, 2008

This book while interesting, leaves much to be desired. They author is a bit scattered, and following his examples and code snips is a bit trying at times. None the less, it is an interesting read on REST style development.

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