RESTful Web Services Cookbook
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Book Description
Solutions for Improving Scalability and Simplicity
Product Description
While the REST design philosophy has captured the imagination of web and enterprise developers alike, using this approach to develop real web services is no picnic. This cookbook includes more than 100 recipes to help you take advantage of REST, HTTP, and the infrastructure of the Web. You'll learn ways to design RESTful web services for client and server applications that meet performance, scalability, reliability, and security goals, no matter what programming language and development framework you use.
Each recipe includes one or two problem statements, with easy-to-follow, step-by-step instructions for solving them, as well as examples using HTTP requests and responses, and XML, JSON, and Atom snippets. You'll also get implementation guidelines, and a discussion of the pros, cons, and trade-offs that come with each solution.
- Learn how to design resources to meet various application scenarios
- Successfully design representations and URIs
- Implement the hypertext constraint using links and link headers
- Understand when and how to use Atom and AtomPub
- Know what and what not to do to support caching
- Learn how to implement concurrency control
- Deal with advanced use cases involving copying, merging, transactions, batch processing, and partial updates
- Secure web services and support OAuth
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Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
Format:Paperback
This book is for those who understand what REST is, understand the importance of the hypermedia constraint, have maybe read "REST in Practice" (my recommended background reading), have read probably a hundred blog posts about REST... and are still slightly unsure about how to actually do it, when it comes down to the nitty-gritty detail. If you feel like that, join the club.
REST is somewhat abstract, and there's no absolute right way or wrong way. Plus there's many many facets of REST that you have to consider when designing your service.
And that's where this book comes in... in an abstract realm, it gives you wonderfully concrete guidance in the form of Recipes. How to do this. When to do that. Covering the main areas of concern - Uniform Interface, Resources, Representations, URIs, Linking, Atom, Content Negotiation, Queries, Caching, Security and more - there are a decent number of recipes per area that cover all the common questions and concerns that service designers have.
I wanted to know how to evaluate whether Atom Syndication Format would be a good fit for my service... there's a recipe for that. I wanted to know how exactly to implement caching and conditional requests - there are multiple recipes for that.
Plus there are warnings about pitfalls that could save your service... I was going to put crucial information (an API key) in a custom HTTP header, but this book informed why that's a really bad idea.
In short, this book is just essential for all REST service designers and implementors. It currently sits to the side of my monitor, and I consult it many times a day when I'm working on our REST service. You're not going to want to read it from start to finish though: it's purely a reference book... an incredibly useful and practical reference book.
One more thing: it pleases me to see that the wonderful Mike Amundsen contributed to ten of the recipes. Mike's a key thinker in this area, and toilers in the RESTful fields should get to know his work.
REST is somewhat abstract, and there's no absolute right way or wrong way. Plus there's many many facets of REST that you have to consider when designing your service.
And that's where this book comes in... in an abstract realm, it gives you wonderfully concrete guidance in the form of Recipes. How to do this. When to do that. Covering the main areas of concern - Uniform Interface, Resources, Representations, URIs, Linking, Atom, Content Negotiation, Queries, Caching, Security and more - there are a decent number of recipes per area that cover all the common questions and concerns that service designers have.
I wanted to know how to evaluate whether Atom Syndication Format would be a good fit for my service... there's a recipe for that. I wanted to know how exactly to implement caching and conditional requests - there are multiple recipes for that.
Plus there are warnings about pitfalls that could save your service... I was going to put crucial information (an API key) in a custom HTTP header, but this book informed why that's a really bad idea.
In short, this book is just essential for all REST service designers and implementors. It currently sits to the side of my monitor, and I consult it many times a day when I'm working on our REST service. You're not going to want to read it from start to finish though: it's purely a reference book... an incredibly useful and practical reference book.
One more thing: it pleases me to see that the wonderful Mike Amundsen contributed to ten of the recipes. Mike's a key thinker in this area, and toilers in the RESTful fields should get to know his work.
Most Helpful Customer Reviews on Amazon.com (beta)
Amazon.com:
11 reviews
14 of 14 people found the following review helpful
Serious REST
2 Jun 2010
Format:Paperback
As is common with O'Reilly's Cookbooks, the style of this book is very terse and to the point. There is not much handholding. The intended audience seems to be system architects who already know what they are doing, but who need to know what they should be aiming for when they want to be RESTful. The "recipes" in this Cookbook are more like Best Practices, since figuring out how to implement them is left as an excercise for the reader.
Compared to my previous readings on REST, this book strongly emphasizes the use of consistent XML formats. For me, this was the most important lesson in the book. It is not enough to just use PUT and DELETE: in order to really think in terms of "representations," you need to design meaningful XML. Along these lines, Allamaraju's discussion of the Atom protocol is particularly interesting.
Compared to my previous readings on REST, this book strongly emphasizes the use of consistent XML formats. For me, this was the most important lesson in the book. It is not enough to just use PUT and DELETE: in order to really think in terms of "representations," you need to design meaningful XML. Along these lines, Allamaraju's discussion of the Atom protocol is particularly interesting.
10 of 10 people found the following review helpful
Easy to read, packed full of details and great presentation.
3 Aug 2011
Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase
I had been following "What is REST" tutorials online for the last few weeks as I was working on an API for an upcoming SaaS product. Unfortunately there were still some nitty-gritty details behind the tenants of RESTful design that weren't clicking in my brain, making it hard for me to really grok if I was following the intended design guidelines correctly or just faking it like so many other services do.
Picking this book up after a recommendation from an HN reader, I got 4 chapters in before the smoke cleared in my brain and I had multiple "Ah ha!" moments such that the whole concept cleared up for me in a matter of days.
It could be the writing style or presentation, but I just found it really easy to digest and answering all my questions as they popped up in my head.
An excellent resource for anyone else working on RESTful API design.
Picking this book up after a recommendation from an HN reader, I got 4 chapters in before the smoke cleared in my brain and I had multiple "Ah ha!" moments such that the whole concept cleared up for me in a matter of days.
It could be the writing style or presentation, but I just found it really easy to digest and answering all my questions as they popped up in my head.
An excellent resource for anyone else working on RESTful API design.
9 of 11 people found the following review helpful
Good book to get up to speed quick on RESTful
18 Mar 2010
Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase
I have not made it through the whole book, but my first impressions are really good. One of the interfaces we were designing for work is to time consuming to wait for a http response, in the first chapter of this book it gives you the way to do Asynchronous requests correctly with rest.
There is also some good information on presenting resources that are not nouns, nouns are easy right you have a collection of people for example, you want to list all the people and do CRUD operations on a particular person. This to me is classical rest and is strait forward to do, but what about verbs (not in the POST, DELETE http sense) but in the give me driving directions sense. The book covers this and actually uses driving directions as it's example.
There are a couple of issues I'm still trying to find covered in the book, like how to do pagination on a collection of resources correctly. There is at least one recipe on this, but I did not see how to indicate a default page size (ie I requested all user accounts, but only returned first 200 dues to size, how does the client know that 200 were returned)
The other thing is the proper way to use http get parameters in search and other limiting operations. It would be nice to have some basic recipes there, but to be fair I might just not have seen them yet.
All in all it's a nice addition to your technical library.
There is also some good information on presenting resources that are not nouns, nouns are easy right you have a collection of people for example, you want to list all the people and do CRUD operations on a particular person. This to me is classical rest and is strait forward to do, but what about verbs (not in the POST, DELETE http sense) but in the give me driving directions sense. The book covers this and actually uses driving directions as it's example.
There are a couple of issues I'm still trying to find covered in the book, like how to do pagination on a collection of resources correctly. There is at least one recipe on this, but I did not see how to indicate a default page size (ie I requested all user accounts, but only returned first 200 dues to size, how does the client know that 200 were returned)
The other thing is the proper way to use http get parameters in search and other limiting operations. It would be nice to have some basic recipes there, but to be fair I might just not have seen them yet.
All in all it's a nice addition to your technical library.
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