Product Description

"Every developer working with the Web needs to read this book." -- David Heinemeier Hansson, creator of the Rails framework

"RESTful Web Services finally provides a practical roadmap for constructing services that embrace the Web, instead of trying to route around it." -- Adam Trachtenberg, PHP author and EBay Web Services Evangelist

You've built web sites that can be used by humans. But can you also build web sites that are usable by machines? That's where the future lies, and that's what RESTful Web Services shows you how to do. The World Wide Web is the most popular distributed application in history, and Web services and mashups have turned it into a powerful distributed computing platform. But today's web service technologies have lost sight of the simplicity that made the Web successful. They don't work like the Web, and they're missing out on its advantages.

This book puts the "Web" back into web services. It shows how you can connect to the programmable web with the technologies you already use every day. The key is REST, the architectural style that drives the Web. This book:

• Emphasizes the power of basic Web technologies -- the HTTP application protocol, the URI naming standard, and the XML markup language
• Introduces the Resource-Oriented Architecture (ROA), a common-sense set of rules for designing RESTful web services
• Shows how a RESTful design is simpler, more versatile, and more scalable than a design based on Remote Procedure Calls (RPC)
• Includes real-world examples of RESTful web services, like Amazon's Simple Storage Service and the Atom Publishing Protocol
• Discusses web service clients for popular programming languages
• Shows how to implement RESTful services in three popular frameworks -- Ruby on Rails, Restlet (for Java), and Django (for Python)
• Focuses on practical issues: how to design and implement RESTful web services and clients

This is the first book that applies the REST design philosophy to real web services. It sets down the best practices you need to make your design a success, and the techniques you need to turn your design into working code. You can harness the power of the Web for programmable applications: you just have to work with the Web instead of against it. This book shows you how.

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Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #4560 in Books
• Published on: 2007-05-08
• Format: Illustrated
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 446 pages

About the Author
Leonard Richardson has been programming since he was eight years old. Recently, the quality of his code has improved somewhat. He is responsible for libraries in many languages, including Rubyful Soup. A California native, he now works in New York and maintains a web site at http://www.crummy.com/.

Sam Ruby is a prominent software developer who has made significant contributions to the many of the Apache Software Foundation's open source projects, and to the standardization of web feeds via his involvement with the Atom web feed standard and the popular Feed Validator web service. He currently holds a Senior Technical Staff Member position in the Emerging Technologies Group of IBM. He resides in Raleigh, North Carolina.

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Customer Reviews

mainly for Ruby programmers
The title should be re-written RESTful web services for Ruby programmers. I didn't realize before buying the book (I bought it online) that almost all of the examples are in Ruby. I don't know Ruby very well, and I really would prefer more examples in Java and Java Script

Brilliant and Horrible
Packed with all sorts of knowledge about REST, HTTP and AJAX this book will make you very capable at building well designed RESTful web services. Any topic imaginable is covered, from obscure ways of handling transactions, to Apache proxies, service implementations in Rails and the limitations of the current browser security model.

While this is all good and useful stuff, it also scatters the books focus, which eventually turns out to be its major problem. The topic orientation simply sucks. I would recommend reading the book in this order:

* Core knowledge
- Introduction, Chapter 1 and 3
- Chapter 4, 8, 9
- Optional: chap 10 (comparison to SOAP).

* REST service examples
- Chapter 5, 6 and 7

* REST clients
- Chapter 2 and 11

The service examples (chapter 5 - 7) should really have been one chapter. The client chapters does not show how to write clients against the provided example services, which is a major mistake. The core knowledge scattered throughout chapter 4, 8 and 9 (like the ATOM publishing protocol which is covered multiple places) should be collected and ordered.

So why the four starts ?. I have to admit that my annoyance with the books topical layout is trumped by the authors knowledge and their ability to pack a surprising number of usable facts into this book. So if you do not loose your way in their topical jungle then you will eventually come through as a REST maven.

Must-read for web 2.0 developers
This book is an outstanding exposition of what makes a web service RESTful, as opposed to RPC-based, why RESTful is important, and how achieve RESTful-ness. The exposition is clear and the examples are helpful and to the point. Best of all, it's a gripping read, and how often can you say that about a book on software methodology and architecture?