There has been a great deal of discussion regarding RESTful web service description languages this week. The debate is great for the community but I think Steve Vinoski has it basically right never once — not even once — have I seen anyone develop a consuming application without relying on some form of human-oriented documentation [...]
A couple of months ago we hired a contractor to write a reporting interface for our high volume monitoring system. Our system exposes all of it’s data in RESTful web services, and his job has been to take that data and allow users to create reports based on it. This morning a couple of my [...]
Authentication has been bane of my existence lately. By which I mean, it is complicated and interesting and I am loving every minute of it (but, as you can see, I am not going to let that stop me from complaining about it). However tonight I have run into an authentication problem that I am [...]
Patrick Mueller contemplates whether or not we really need URIs in our documents1. This is a pretty common question in my experience. This question comes up because it is not always immediately obvious just how powerful embedding links in documents is. What Mr. Mueller suggests is that if you have a client that needs account [...]
Consider a situation where you have a type of resource which always belongs to a resource of another type. How do you model the URI space using Rails? For example, say you have an address resource type. An address is always associated with exactly one user, but a user may have several addresses (work, home, [...]
We recently settled on using JSON as the preferred format for the REST-based distributed application on which I am working. We don’t need the expressiveness of XML and JSON is a lot cheaper to generate and parse, particularly in Ruby. Now we are busy defining dialects to encode the data we have, which is happy [...]
David Chappell declares the REST vs WS-* war over To anybody who’s paying attention and who’s not a hopeless partisan, the war between REST and WS-* is over. The war ended in a truce rather than crushing victory for one side–it’s Korea, not World War II. The now-obvious truth is that both technologies have value, [...]
One of the least well understood core tenets of the REST architectural style is that “hypermedia is the engine of application state”. Which basically means that responses from the server will be documents that include URIs to everything you can do next. For example, if GET a blog post the response document will have URIs [...]
I recently setup an automated backup system for my (and my wife’s) blog.1 Based on the recommendation of Mr O’Grady (and my belief that RESTful architectures are a good way to solve most problems) I decided to use Amazon’s S3 as the off site storage. I did not to take the same approach as RedMonk, [...]
Benjamin Carlyle has posted a followup about using PUT to create new resources in which he brings up some interesting issues. First, it seems I miss understood his original idea slightly. My misunderstanding does not affect how I feel about his approach much. I don’t like the idea of PUT-ting to a “factory” resource with [...]
