This dissertation introduces and elaborates the Representational State Transfer (REST) architectural style for distributed hypermedia systems, describing the software engineering principles guiding REST and the interaction constraints chosen to retain those principles, while contrasting them to the constraints of other architectural styles.
How do we know how much Restful API is? Some developers call it “Not Restful API”, some call it “Partially Restful API”, for some, it is “Fully Restful API”, and for some “It is not REST API at all or they call it SOAP based web service”. Imagine it as a spectrum from Not Restful to Fully Restful API. To know at which level API stand, Richardson introduces a model called Richardson Maturity Model. As the name itself suggests, it tells about the maturity level of REST API.
XRX is a new web development architecture that is a milestone in elegant simplicity. XRX stands for:
XForms on the client
REST interfaces
and XQuery on the server
XRX is a new web development architecture that is a milestone in elegant simplicity. XRX stands for: XForms on the client REST interfaces and XQuery on the server Because XRX uses a single model for data (XML) it avoids the translation complexity of other architectures. The simplicity and elegance of XRX allows developers to focus on other value-added features of web application development and enables non-programmers to create a rich web interaction experience without the need to use procedural programming languages.
For much of the first year or two in the life of Web services - and indeed all of their history up to that point - they were about remote procedure calls (RPC); exposing remote APIs across the Internet in order to facilitate machine-to-machine communication and ultimately, business-to-business integration over the Internet. It didn’t take very long however, for Web services proponents to realize that they needed to distance themselves from RPC and its well-deserved reputation as a poor large scale integration architectural style, due to the failure of systems such as CORBA, DCOM, and RMI to see any widespread use on the Internet. So, sometime in 2000/2001, collective wisdom in the space shifted towards a preference for “document oriented” services. Vendors quickly jumped on board with upgraded toolkits, and that was that; documents were the New Big Thing.
Based on the same architectural pattern of the web, "REST" has a growing dominance of the SOA (Service Oriented Architecture) implementation these days. In this article, we will discuss some basic design principles of REST.
In this interview, recorded at QCon London, Jim Webber, ThoughtWorks SOA practice leader talks to Stefan Tilkov about Guerilla SOA, Description Language (SSDL).