Who needs REST?
I have been reading a bunch of online articles about REST (REpresentational State Transfer) which was first discussed in Roy Thomas Fielding’s Dissertation ‘Architectural Styles and the Design of Network-based Software Architecture’. Though in this body of work Fielding never argues that either REST or HTTP constituted a sufficient basis for a web services architecture, there a number of people that are pointing to it’s use for web services. There is a debate raging about which is better SOAP or REST web service implementations.
I first learned of REST while looking into Facebooks API Wiki which states “The API uses a REST-like interface. This means that our Facebook method calls are made over the internet by sending HTTP GET or POST requests to the Facebook API REST server.”
Never having heard of REST before I did some digging. As it turns out Flickr and Amazon uses REST-like interfaces for some of their APIs. Blogs that uses RSS or Atom feeds can be said to be REST-based. WSDL version 2.0 defines bindings to all the HTTP request methods (not only GET and POST as in version 1.1), which is specified by the REST style of software architecture.
I am not going to get into what REST is and REST isn’t, but I plan to in the future as I try to better understand that implications of how to implement a RESTful interface for an application.
Articles of note:
[...] have covered a couple of REST topics previously,(Who Needs REST? and Now for the REST of the Story). I started playing around with a client library used to consume [...]