REST

Representational State Transfer

whoami
Colin Harrington
colin.harrington@objectpartners.com
colin@colinharrington.net
http://colinharrington.net
@ColinHarrington
History
HTTP :: HyperText Transfer Protocol
Tim Berners-Lee :: 1990s

Foundations of the Web

OSI Layer 7
Application Layer


Protocol
History
REST :: Representational State Transfer

2000 Doctoral Dissertation by Roy T. Fielding
http://www.ics.uci.edu/~fielding/pubs/dissertation/top.htm

"Roy Thomas Fielding (born 1965) is an American computer
scientist
[1]
, one of the principal authors of the HTTP specification, an
authority on computer network architecture
[2]
and co-founder of the
Apache HTTP Server project." (Wikipedia)
http://roy.gbiv.com/

@fielding
History - REST
Architecture:
Client-Server
Stateless + Cacheable
Uniform Interface + Layerable

Data:
Resources, identifiers & metadata
Representation & metadata
Control Data { headers }

Elements:
{clients, server, resolver, cache}
Gateways, proxies, user agents
URL, URI, Schemes
REST
REST is a buzzword and a movement but it symbolizes a coherent
usage of the web (HTTP) as it was designed


REST ~ HTTP done right.
Resources
Uniform Resource Identifiers (URI)

<scheme>:<scheme-specified-structure>

ftp://example.org/resource.txt
urn:issn:1535-3613
mailto:colin@colinharrington.net
Uniform Resource Locator (URL)

scheme://domain:port/path?query_string
HTTP Methods/Verbs
HEAD, GET, OPTIONS => considered "safe"
PUT, POST, DELETE => possibly destructive
TRACE, DEBUG => Considered harmful

curl -v http://www.google.com
GET / HTTP/1.1
User-Agent: curl/7.21.0
Host: www.google.com
Accept: */*
Accept Headers :: Client
GET / HTTP/1.1
User-Agent: curl/7.21.0
Host: www.google.com
Accept: */*


Accept: application/xml


Accept: text/html,application/xhtml+xml,
application/xml;q=0.9,*/*;q=0.8,
application/json

HTTP Status Codes
200 - OK
301 - Moved permanently
302 - Moved temporarily
404 - Not Found
500
http://www.w3.org/Protocols/rfc2616/rfc2616-sec10.html
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Date: Mon, 31 Oct 2011 16:07:53 GMT
Expires: -1
Cache-Control: private, max-age=0
Content-Type: text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1
http://homestarrunner.com/404d
Representations
XML
JSON
HTML
XHTML
RDF
Text
Custom Formats
JSON Example
{
"firstName": "John",
"lastName" : "Smith",
"age" : 25,
"address" :
{
"streetAddress": "21 2nd Street",
"city" : "New York",
"state" : "NY",
"postalCode" : "10021"
},
"phoneNumber":
[
{
"type" : "home",
"number": "212 555-1234"
},
{
"type" : "fax",
"number": "646 555-4567"
}
]
}
Content Negotiation
Request:
Accept Header
Accept: application/xml
Accept-Language
Accept-Encoding

Response:
Content-Type: text/json

Accept: text/html,application/xhtml+xml,
application/xml;q=0.9,*/*;q=0.8,
application/json

Cacheability
HTTP Cache Headers
Expires
Cache-Control
ETag
Last-Modified
Pragma no-cache

Proxy & Network path.
CRUD
Create :: POST

Read :: GET

Update :: PUT

Delete :: DELETE

* http://stackoverflow.com/questions/630453/put-vs-post-in-rest
Hypermedia
Linking
to other resources / media
HTML documents, resources
loosely coupled
Images, CSS, favicon, etc.
Like this image ->
http://cuip.uchicago.edu/~cac/images/Hypermedia.jpg
Who
http://www.programmableweb.com/

Amazon Web Services
{S3, EC2, SQS, RDS, FPS, etc.}



Just to name a few...
Resources
This guy explains REST in to his non-technical wife:
http://tomayko.com/writings/rest-to-my-wife
Good article on how to REST with curl:
http://blogs.plexibus.com/2009/01/15/rest-esting-with-curl/
Poster -- the Firefox plugin:
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/poster/
You'd probably learn best by actually making some RESTful
calls. Pick a service that is free and RESTful and play around with it. I'd
recommend using http://www.twilio.com/ just because they offer you
$30 in free credit and you get to make, receive and control real phone
calls.
Thank You