Java Reference
In-Depth Information
Chapter 1. Introduction to REST
For those of us with computers, the World Wide Web is an intricate part of our lives. We use
it to read the newspaper in the morning, pay our bills, perform stock trades, and buy goods
and services, all through the browser, all over the network. “Googling” has become a part of
our daily vocabulary as we use search engines to do research for school, find what time a
movie is playing, or just search for information on old friends. Door-to-door encyclopedia
salesmen have gone the way of the dinosaur as Wikipedia has become the summarized
source of human knowledge. People even socialize over the network using sites like Face-
book and Google+. Professional social networks are sprouting up in all industries as doctors,
lawyers, and all sorts of professionals use them to collaborate. The Web is an intricate part of
our daily jobs as programmers. We search for and download open source libraries to help us
develop applications and frameworks for our companies. We build web-enabled applications
so that anybody on the Internet or intranet can use a browser to interact with our systems.
Really, most of us take the Web for granted. Have you, as a programmer, sat down and tried
to understand why the Web has been so successful? How has it grown from a simple network
of researchers and academics to an interconnected worldwide community? What properties
of the Web make it so viral?
One man, Roy Fielding, did ask these questions in his doctoral thesis, “Architectural Styles
chitectural principles that answer the following questions:
▪ Why is the Web so prevalent and ubiquitous?
▪ What makes the Web scale?
▪ How can I apply the architecture of the Web to my own applications?
The set of these architectural principles is called REpresentational State Transfer (REST) and
is defined as:
Addressable resources
The key abstraction of information and data in REST is a resource, and each resource
must be addressable via a URI (Uniform Resource Identifier).
A uniform, constrained interface
Use a small set of well-defined methods to manipulate your resources.
Representation-oriented
You interact with services using representations of that service. A resource referenced by
one URI can have different formats. Different platforms need different formats. For ex-
