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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.
Featured Customer Reviews  mainly for Ruby programmers,
July 30, 2008 Brilliant and Horrible,
July 19, 2008
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,
June 02, 2008Essential guide for building REST Web Services,
May 05, 2008 This book fills a gap that has existed for a long time. It clearly explains the advantages of RESTful architecture, It cuts through the SOAP vs. REST nonsense and helps you to understand some of the most important and poorly understood concepts of the web's architecture.Great (but repetitive) Guide,
March 11, 2008 Sure... it's got its issues: very repetitive, some glitches here & there... But overall, it's the best (if not the DEFINITIVE) guide to RESTful Web Services.
If you've used SOAP and/or other Web Services-related technologies/schemas/etc. etc. etc. you should have no problem following this. For beginners, however, it is definitely not the place to start. You will need to read-up a bit more on Web Services in general and some of the options and practices out there.
The repetition in the book isn't so bad. It drives home a lot of good points and covers quite a bit of in-depth information (sometimes too much, but it has come in handy when talking with other professionals/engineers).
To work with Web Services and not have at least glanced over this book would be a huge mistake. Just be careful: it may take you a while to get through. It does get a little boring from time to time.
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