If you are serious student of web architecture, then you probably already know about REST. If not, there is a 10-page article (PDF format). I am printing it now, for later reading. Is REST just a purely academic exercise? Or is there something in it for real-world web application developers?
While I don't fully understand REST at this point, my initial impression is that web application design using some of the ideas of REST will be important for web applications to be really successful. RPC interfaces do tend to be rather brittle. Finding a way to make them less brittle would likely make them more "successful".
Here's the problem that I'm hoping REST can solve: If you want to aggregrate a bunch of component web services to create a higher level web service, it may be very difficult because each component service has very specific APIs, object models, etc. For each component service, think of sitting down with 50 pages of documentation that are required reading before you can use that component service effectively. Obviously, in that situation, aggregation is a daunting task. REST is supposedly fundamentally different from RPC. REST is credited with the success of the HTTP/URL/HTML success formula of the current web. Again, I don't fully understand REST, but what I do know seems interesting.
Posted by Doug Sauder at April 25, 2002 11:32 AM