Service-Oriented Design with Ruby and Rails

Appendix. RESTful Primer

Roy Fielding described Representational State Transfer (REST) in 2000, in his doctoral dissertation (http://www.ics.uci.edu/~fielding/pubs/dissertation/rest_arch_style.htm), as an architectural style for distributed hypermedia systems. His work wasn’t tied specifically to HTTP and web services, but it has often been applied to the problem of web services design. This appendix takes a quick look at Fielding’s paper, reviews the basics of HTTP, and outlines how these map to the concepts of REST.

Roy Fielding’s REST

REST is an often-invoked and often-misunderstood concept. To help clear up some of the confusion, let’s look at the original source, Fielding’s paper. In the summary of the section on REST, Fielding states: ...