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REST Anti-Patterns

In this article, Stefan Tilkov explains some of the most common anti-patterns found in applications that claim to follow a "RESTful" design and suggests ways to avoid them: tunneling everything through GET or POST, ignoring caching, response codes, misusing cookies, forgetting hypermedia and MIME types, and breaking self-descriptiveness.

Stefan Tilkov
on Jul 02, 2008
David Nuescheler on JCR and REST

In this interview, Day CTO and JCR Spec Lead David Nuescheler discusses the benefits of JCR, the Java Content Repository standard, the difference between an API such as Atom/Atom Publishing protocol and JCR, JCR's connection to REST, and Apache Sling, a new kind of Web framework.

Stefan Tilkov
on Jun 10, 2008
A RESTful ESB implemented using NetKernel

Jeremy Deane, Technical Architect at Collaborative Consulting, takes a look at writing a Restful ESB using NetKernel. He explains how commercial ESB's were considered and NetKernel was ultimately used to provide the implementation.

Jeremy Deane
on Apr 08, 2008
RESTful Services with Erlang and Yaws

In this article, Steve Vinoski explains how to build RESTful Web services using the Erlang programming language and the Yaws web server. While Steve considers most Web frameworks failures simply because they were a poor match to the problem, he believes Yaws and Erlang are a better match for RESTful development than many other language frameworks that were built specifically for that purpose.

Steve Vinoski
on Mar 31, 2008
Addressing Doubts about REST

Invariably, learning about REST means that you’ll end up wondering just how applicable the concept really isbeyond introductory, “Hello, World”-level stuff. In this article, Stefan Tilkov addresses 10 of the most common doubts people have about REST when they start exploring it, especially if they have a strong background in the architectural approach behind SOAP/WSDL-based Web services.

Stefan Tilkov
on Mar 13, 2008
Hypermedia in RESTful applications

One of the constraints defined for the architectural style known as REST is "hypermedia as the engine of application state". Mark Baker, well-known for being one of the first who advocated the REST style instead of the mainstream web services approach, discusses that the hypermedia constraints means in practice and why it is essential to RESTful design.

Mark Baker
on Jan 28, 2008
Talking Rails 2.0 with David Heinemeier Hansson

Ruby on Rails 2.0 is the next version of the premier web application framework for the Ruby language, after almost a full year in development. Rails 2.0 is full of great new features, bug fixes and lots of the polish expected from the team. InfoQ had the opportunity to talk with the creator of Rails, David Heinemeier Hansson, to learn what it's like to get this release out the door.

Robert Bazinet
on Dec 21, 2007
Architecture & Design

A Brief Introduction to REST

In this article, Stefan Tilkov provides a pragmatic introduction to REST (REpresentational State Transfer), the architecture behind the World Wide Web, and covers the key principles: Identifiable resources, links and hypermedia, standard methods, multiple representations and stateless communication.

Stefan Tilkov
on Dec 10, 2007
Open Source WS Stacks for Java - Design Goals and Philosophy

InfoQ's Stefan Tilkov questioned lead developers of Apache Axis2, Apache CXF, Spring Web Services, JBossWS and and Sun’s Metro about their design goals, their approach towards Java and Web services standards, data binding, accessing XML, interoperability, REST support, and framework maturity. The results revealed many similarities and some noteworthy differences.

Stefan Tilkov
on Oct 04, 2007
Interview and Book Excerpt: RESTful Web Services

Today, InfoQ publishes a sample chapter from RESTful Web Services, a book authored by Leonard Richardson and Sam Ruby. The book covers the principles of the REST style, and explains how to build RESTful applications using Java, Ruby, and Python. InfoQ's Stefan Tilkov had a chance to talk to the authors about their motivations for writing this book and their views on REST and Web services.

Stefan Tilkov
on Jun 01, 2007
Interview: Jérome Louvel about Restlet

In this exclusive InfoQ interview, Jérome Louvel talks about Restlet, a Java framework for building Web applications following the REST architectural style. Topics covered include the reason for Restlet's existence, REST support in Web services frameworks and in Ruby on Rails, expectations for JSR 311 and Restlet's roadmap.

Stefan Tilkov
on Apr 17, 2007
Versatile RESTful APIs Beyond XML

The world of RESTful resources that Rails firmly entered with version 1.2 naturally uses XML as its lingua franca. But there's no reason that it can't be multi-lingual, and thanks to the versatility of rails it's easy to support other standards alongside XML in our RESTful applications, potentially opening them up to a wider audience and/or reducing their bandwidth requirements.

James Stewart
on Mar 13, 2007