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June 4, 2008

RESTful Web Services Book

I've just started reading an interesting book I bought a few months ago.

I've just started reading an interesting book I bought a few months ago. It is titled "RESTful Web Services", comes from O'Reilly, and has been written by Leonard Richardson and Sam Ruby. Its core idea seems to be web services must be kept simple to work and scale, and for this reason REST is way better than SOAP.

Two quotes. One is from the foreword of David H. Hansson:

A renaissance of HTTP appreciation is building and, under the banner of REST, shows a credible alternative to what the merchants of complexity are trying to ram down everyone's throats... [the book] shows you how to use those principles without the drama, the big words and the miles of indirection that have scared a generation of web developers into thinking that web services are so hard...

The second quote is from the book preface:

HTTP is uniquely well suited to distributed Internet applications because it has no features to speak of. HTTP weakness is its strength, its simplicity its power

I actually still haven't got to Chapter 1, but I think I'll like this book, and might as well get back to work on my own Delphi rest framework is this is inspiring.

posted by marcocantu @ 6:37PM | 5 Comments [0 Pending]




 

5 Comments

RESTful Web Services Book  

 When I read the title of this blog at DelphiFeeds, I
thought you wrote this book for Delphi developers, so
I can here to buy it, but I found post talking about
another book :(

I'm really waiting for a book with a similar title

Regards,
Mohammed
Comment by Mohammed Nasman [http://www.mnasman.com] on June 4, 19:38

RESTful Web Services Book  

 My one and only experience of REST was truly
appalling. It added at least 4 man-months to a
project, just on the side calling the so-called web
service. It must have been about twice that on the web
service side. 

Also, not all web services need to scale (that
particular one will never need to).

The moral of my story - SOAP is easier.
Comment by Jim Cooper on June 5, 15:46

RESTful Web Services Book  

Very good book.
Actually making webservices restful make them much
more easier to develop and test.
Also the book take web service definition very
broadly, including normal sites too.
The part about auth-auth is also very interesting and
eye opening.

Cheers
Uberto
Comment by uberto [http://uberto.wordpress.com] on June 5, 21:22

RESTful Web Services Book  

"When you get an hammer, everything start to look 
like a nail". That's what happened with HTTP. It was 
designed to move documents around, and despite its 
shortcomings people started to use it for tasks it 
wasn't designed for. One could use most of the other 
internet protocols for the same tasks...
Comment by Luigi D. Sandon on June 5, 22:15

RESTful Web Services Book  

I've been using a REST based architecture for a big 3 tier system for the 
last 2 years, and it has worked brilliantly:

- Built in authentication, compression, encryption, caching
- Debugging is easy using Fiddler
- Makes you make the server stateless which fixes loads of bugs
- Easy to load test the server
- Thinking in resources makes your design clearer

With a bit of mapping and a custom midas connections, I run 
Clientdatasets over the REST layer, so its still easy to develop on the 
client using data binding.

I cannot recommend the approach enough.
Comment by David Glassborow [http://blogs.conceptfirst.com] on June 6, 12:18


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