Restful Web Services

You’ve built web sites that can be used by other people. But can you build web sites that are usable by machines? The World Wide Web isn’t just a big distributed application—it’s a platform for distributed computing. Web services, mashups, and Ajax applications all use the Web as a 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 explains 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.

RESTful Web Services:

• Emphasizes the power of basic web technologies—the HTTP application protocol, the URI naming standard, and the XML markup language
  
  
• Introduces the Resource-Oriented Architecture (ROA), a common-sense set of rules for designing RESTful web services
  
  
• Reveals how a RESTful design is simpler, more versatile, and more scalable than a design based on Remote Procedure Calls (RPCs)
  
  
• Includes real-world examples of RESTful web services, like Amazon’s Simple Storage Service and the Atom Publishing Protocol
  
  
• Discusses web service clients for popular programming languages
  
  
• Demonstrates how to implement RESTful services in three popular frameworks—Ruby on Rails, Restlet (for Java), and Django (for Python)
  
  
• Focuses on practical issues, such as how to design and implement RESTful web services and clients

RESTful Web Services 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.

About the Authors
Leonard Richardson has been programming since he was eight. Recently the quality of his code has improved somewhat. He is responsible for libraries in many languages, including Rubyful Soup. A California native, he now works in New York. He maintains a website at http://www.crummy.com/.

Sam Ruby takes a perverse pleasure in integrating disparate things. He is a Vice President of the Apache Software Foundation, chairman of the Jakarta project, member of the XML PMC. He is an officer of ECMA and convener of the TC39 group standardizing the CLI for DotNet. He is a member of the PHP group, and developer on the Apache Soap and Bean Scripting Framework projects. He is currently employed by IBM.

Table Of Contents:

Chapter 1 The Programmable Web and Its Inhabitants
Chapter 2 Writing Web Service Clients
Chapter 3 What Makes RESTful Services Different?
Chapter 4 The Resource-Oriented Architecture
Chapter 5 Designing Read-Only Resource-Oriented Services
Chapter 6 Designing Read/Write Resource-Oriented Services
Chapter 7 A Service Implementation
Chapter 8 REST and ROA Best Practices
Chapter 9 The Building Blocks of Services
Chapter 10 The Resource-Oriented Architecture Versus Big Web Services
Chapter 11 Ajax Applications as REST Clients
Chapter 12 Frameworks for RESTful Services
Appendix Some Resources for REST and Some RESTful Resources
Appendix The HTTP Response Code Top 42
Appendix The HTTP Header Top Infinity
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