How to REST?

Today I tried to explain REST (as in REpresentational State Transfer, not near sleep) to a manager and why some of the services deployed at the organization he was working for wasn't REST. While there isn't a formalized spec, there is a dissertation by the Roy Fielding, who came up with the REST-principles as a set of principles that guided him while shaping the HTTP 1.1 standard which only recently got a successor with version 2.0… REST is a set of principles/guidelines that are very stable & predictable. It is also very simple, and theirin lies both its strength, and the sometimes too loose application of its principles.

Apparently many developers didn't get 'the web' (HTTP) right, hence REST was developed as a basic set of principles to explain how HTTP is supposed to work. This is a list of my favourite parts, also based on some secondary resources.

Some key concepts.

REST is about …

Try not using Javascript first

My guiding principle in web-development is (still): Always make things work without (client side) JavaScript first.

Aside from offering a graceful degradation of the experience by progressively enhancing it leads to better code. Three reasons why:

1. it forces you as a developer to think about logical endpoints for your form submits, your data requests etc. Typically this leads to fewer cases of overloading a resource with all kinds of unrelated functionality (yep, I'm a big REST-first advocate).
2. your application will probably be more web-native, and hence more future proof, more easily cache-able, etc.
3. the front-end JavaScript to enrich the experience will typically also be less complex and can be generalized more easily.

Yes, I do shiver when I hear things like CSS in JS, KISS!

Photo by [Dmitry Baranovskiy](https://www.flickr.com/photos/dmitry-baranovsk…

BookReview: RESTful Web Services

Web Services hebben we het over het gedeelte van het internet dat begrepen kan worden, in tegenstelling tot het gewone web van web sites, door computer systemen. Er zijn verschillende manieren hoe je computer A over het internet met computer B kunt laten praten, en de RESTful wijze is er daar 1 van. In het boek RESTful Web Services, geschreven door Leonard Richardson en Sam Ruby (ISBN nr.: (978) 0596529260), wordt deze wijze uitgebreid behandeld.

Ten opzichte van andere manieren van communiceren over het internet is dat het uit gaat van de eenvoud van het HTTP protocol, dit in tegenstelling tot b.v. SOAP en RPC. Hoewel ook deze technologiën uiteindelijk wel over het HTTP gaan hebben deze technologiën een geheel andere benadering in de wijze waarin informatie op gevraagd en gemanipuleerd kan worden. Deze benadering is resource oriented, i.p.v. activity oriented. In plaats van de actie die veelal centraal staat …