Rest architecture
Posted by Aurélien Pelletier | Filed under architecture
I see more and more blogs using the word REST which stand for Representational State Transfer, but what the heck does this means??
Did my googling and found that the REST architecture was first described in this paper a very good read indeed.
Here is what I’ve learnt from it. If you consider the World Wide Web as one huge distributed application, REST is the architecture for this application.
WWW being such a successful distributed application it is very interesting to put a layer of abstraction on its architecture. This enables us to extract the main properties of the World Wide Web architecture and understand why it is so good.
First the WWW protocols are mostly stateless => which is good for scalability
WWW resources are cacheable => performance
WWW resources are available through one generic interface => better interoperability and ease of extension.
WWW has a layered architecture => decoupling of components, ease of maintenance and evolution
Examples of REST API include:
http://www.bloglines.com/services/
http://del.icio.us/doc/api
http://www.flickr.com/services/api/request.rest.html
Three very successful services.
The Rest architecture by Aurélien Pelletier, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 2.0 France License.
Related posts:
- SOAP is the EJB of XML???
- Tout, vous saurez tout, sur REST
- Slides Ressource Oriented Architecture
- Architecture orienté ressource au symposium DNG 2008
- Le retour du Web dans les Web services
Tags: architecture, rest
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