Subbu Allamaraju - RESTful Web Services Cookbook: Solutions for Improving Scalability and Simplicity

Copyright 2010 Yahoo!, Inc.

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This book is not a discourse on REST or its merits over other styles of architecture. This is a cookbook for designers and developers of RESTful web services.

Plenty of material exists that describes the REST architectural style. Wikipedias entry on Representational State Transfer (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Representational_State_Transfer) provides a concise description of RESTs underlying concepts, its constraints, and the guiding principles to design applications. Leonard Richardson and Sam Rubys RESTful Web Services (OReilly) provides a more in-depth coverage on the basics of this topic detailing how to use resources as the core building blocks. But how do you find help with day-to-day design and implementation questions? This is the book to fill that gap.

This book consists of recipes to help design and implement RESTful client/server applications. It presents these recipes in a manner that lets you take advantage of the web infrastructure and REST without having to ponder whether your web service is RESTful. Each recipe includes one or more problem statements and a solution, followed by a detailed discussion with examples, commentary on implementation, and any trade-offs involved.

Much of the material for the recipes is based on common design problems found while developing RESTful web services. The problems include usage of HTTP, resource and representation design, URIs, caching, concurrency control, partial updates, batch processing, transactions, security, versioning, compatibility, etc.

This book is not programming language specific. It uses HTTP request and response messages to illustrate implementation. You can use languages such as C#, C++, Java, Ruby, Python, PHP, and Perl to implement these recipes. See for a list of programming languagespecific books, or search your favorite bookstore.

This book does not also deal with installing, administering, or securing web servers, caches, and proxies. See books such as Apache Cookbook by Ken Coar and Rich Bowen, Apache Security by Ivan Ristic, and Squid: The Definitive Guide by Duane Wessels (all from OReilly), or product manuals to learn such topics.

See http://www.restful-webservices-cookbook.org for additional material, errata, comments, and questions about this book.

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