April 25, 2002

Okay, here are two

Okay, here are two of the best articles on REST, both by Paul Prescod.

Second Generation Web Services

REST and the Real World

Apparently, the REST architecture suggests:

  1. Use a URI whenever possible
  2. Actions on URIs should be simple actions, like the HTTP GET, POST, PUT, and DELETE
  3. Standard data formats are important, and in the future, these formats will probably be XML vocabularies

Each URI identifies a resource, which can be a very general concept. In a sense, it is the concept of a name that is the most important. Therefore, you could consider a "resource" to be anything that can be named (by a URI). The stanardized data formats are also very important. The current Web makes extensive use of HTML, GIF, JPEG, and a few other standard formats.

REST is certainly much simpler than SOAP or XML-RPC. It is more flexible, too, since you can enter a URI into the "URI line" of a web browser. You just can't enter a SOAP RPC invocation into a URI line.

Posted by Doug Sauder at April 25, 2002 10:24 PM