Chapter 11. REST: Representational State Transfer


Until now our focus has been XML-RPC and SOAP-based web services. However, recent developments in this field show that these methods don't cover all available web services. One alternative is Representational State Transfer, or REST. Despite the long history (in Internet time) and large number of applications that run the Internet, this approach for developing distributed applications wasn't popular until recently. Some of the more vocal proponents of the REST style include Roy Fielding, Mark Baker, Jeff Bone, Paul Prescod, and Roger Costello. The information presented in this chapter is based largely on their ideas.

Think of a distributed system [1] in which every resource has a standard way to reference it (URI), uses a standard method of access (HTTP), has well-defined document structure of its metadata and representation (XML), supports multiple formats (through content negotiation and transformations), refers to other related resources in which the client can dig for more information (XLink, XPointer), has a standard way to describe how resources can be accessed (WSDL, WRDL), advertises its presence in a standard manner (UDDI, WS-Inspection), and uses a common mechanism for authentication and authorization. It isn't expected that all the pieces will be in place at once; this vision can be implemented incrementally. What's more, it can be done for little additional cost if the simple principles described in this chapter are followed.

[1] This is a restatement of Phillip J. Windley's vision outlined in http://www.das.state.ut.us/cc/aug2002/ciomessage.html.



Programming Web Services with Perl
Programming Web Services with Perl
ISBN: 0596002068
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2000
Pages: 123

flylib.com © 2008-2017.
If you may any questions please contact us: flylib@qtcs.net