Preface
THE WEB HAS REVOLUTIONIZED THE WAY WE ACCESS AND SHARE INFORMATION. In just two decades, it has become the global platform for delivering and consuming services.
The pervasiveness and ubiquity of the Web stems from the way it combines architectural simplicity with a small set of widely accepted technologies. The Web provides scalability, security, and reliability for those systems that embrace its simple tenets, and it does so using commodity tools and platforms.
Our goal in this book is twofold: to demystify the Web as an application platform and to showcase how web architecture can be applied to common enterprise computing problems. Throughout the chapters, we make it a point to demonstrate how services can leverage the Web both inside and outside enterprise boundaries. Our vision is of an information platform that is open and available to other systems, which eschews integration in favor of composition, and yet implements valuable business behaviors: a distributed, hypermedia-driven application platform.
You donât have to know REST or HTTP in detail in order to understand this book. Weâll take you from simple integration through to sophisticated business protocols, all with detailed code examples that you can adapt for your own ends.
Should I Read This Book?
Like most of us, youâre probably already building something that feeds into the Web, and youâve probably used tools and patterns for the Web that seem pretty useful. Then youâve tackled typical enterprise problems and wondered why it canât be as nice as the web stuff.
Youâre seeing the benefits of the Web all around and you start to question whether your enterpriseâs expensive middleware offers a good return on investment, or whether it will ever scale to meet your usersâ demands.
You might be a developer who wants to understand the Webâs principles in more detail, and likes to learn through code examples. Youâve heard terms such as URIs, HTTP, and Atom, and you want to learn more about them, including the type of support you can get from popular programming platforms.
You may even be an enthusiast who has heard about REST and wants to know what it is all about. You want to learn more about âhypermediaâ and the REST architectural style so that you can build resource-oriented systems and implement sophisticated business protocols atop the Web.
This book will help.
Should I Skip This Book?
If you are looking to learn how to design websites or how to write JavaScript applications, this book will not offer you much, though thereâs plenty for competent AJAX developers to leverage from our approach to building backend services.
If you are looking to build mashups or systems for people to use directly, this book is probably not for you. Weâve focused on machine-to-machine interactions. In fact, this book is full of machines talking to one another through the Web.
We rather like it that way.
Resources
The book is accompanied by a website: http://restinpractice.com. There youâll find working code samples from the book, links to other resources, errata, and community information. We will make every effort to continuously update the site with more information.
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Errata
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Conventions Used in This Book
The following font conventions are used in this book:
- Italic
Indicates Internet addresses, such as domain names and URIs, and new items where they are defined
Constant widthIndicates method, variable, and class names in programs; also, XML element and attribute names, and HTTP idioms
Constant width boldIndicates emphasis in program code lines
Using Code Examples
This book is here to help you get your job done. In general, you may use the code in this book in your programs and documentation. You do not need to contact us for permission unless youâre reproducing a significant portion of the code. For example, writing a program that uses several chunks of code from this book does not require permission. Selling or distributing a CD-ROM of examples from OâReilly books does require permission. Answering a question by citing this book and quoting example code does not require permission. Incorporating a significant amount of example code from this book into your productâs documentation does require permission.
We appreciate, but do not require, attribution. An attribution usually includes the title, authors, publisher, copyright holder, and ISBN. For example: âREST in Practice by Jim Webber, Savas Parastatidis, and Ian Robinson (OâReilly). Copyright 2010 Jim Webber, Savas Parastatidis, and Ian Robinson, 978-0-596-80582-1.â
If you feel your use of code examples falls outside fair use or the permission given here, feel free to contact us at permissions@oreilly.com.
How to Contact Us
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Acknowledgments
We would like to thank all our community reviewers for their feedback and advice over the course of this book project. They all volunteered their time to help us write this book over several years: Solomon Duskis, Rafael de F. Ferreira, Glen Ford, Martin Fowler, Colin Jack, Ken Kolchier, Sriram Narayan, Eric Newcomer, Barry Norton, Chris Read, Ryan Riley, Guilherme Silveira, Halvard Skogsrud, Nigel Small, Monika Solanki, Stefan Tilkov, Jon Tirsen, Spiros Tzavellas, Steve Vinoski, Lasse Westh-Nielsen, and Herbjörn Wilhelmsen.
Our OâReilly reviewers also deserve to be called out for their very useful and prompt feedback: William MartÃnez Pomares and Zach Kessin.
Our great appreciation and warm thanks go to our editor, Simon St.Laurent.
Special thanks to Mark Baker, who inspired us to write this book, educated us along the way, and never gave up on us.
This book wouldnât have been possible without the constant love and support of our families and friends. Special thanks go to Kath, Mary, Lottie, Tiger, and Elliot. Itâs been a long road.
Our deepest thanks to you all.
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