Now that the Java world is noticing REST, the low-pain alternative to RPC standards like WS-*, people are starting to blog about it again. Gossip with other IT folks also tells me that people’s customers are actually asking for REST explicitly (rather than having to be convinced to use it). With that in mind, I’m going to try to explain what I think matters about REST, and what you can safely ignore.
The elevator pitch
With REST, every piece of information has its own URL.
If you just do that and nothing else, you’ve got 90%+ of REST’s benefits right off the bat. You can cache, bookmark, index, and link your information into a giant, well, web. It works — you’re reading this, after all, aren’t you? Betcha got here by following a link somewhere, not by parsing a WSDL to find what ports and services were available.
Real best practices
If you want to do REST well (rather than just doing REST), you can spend 2-3 minutes after your elevator ride learning a few very simple best practices to get most of the remaining 10% of REST’s benefits:
Use HTTP POST to update information. Here’s the simple rule: GET to read, POST to change. That way, no body deletes or modifies something by accident when trying to read it.
Make sure your information contains links (URLs) for retrieving related information. That’s how search engines index the web, and it can work for other kinds of information (XML, PDF, JSON, etc.) as well. Once you have one thing, you can follow links to find just about everything else (assuming that you understand the file format).
Try to avoid request parameters (the stuff after the question mark). It’s much better to have a URL like
http://www.example.org/systems/foo/components/bar/
than
http://www.example.org/get-component.asp?system=foo&component=bar
Search engines are more likely to index it, you’re less likely to end up with duplicates in caches and hash tables (e.g. if someone lists the request parameters in a different order), URLs won’t change when you refactor your code or switch to a different web framework, and you can always switch to static, pregenerated files for efficiency if you want to. Exceptions: searches (http://www.example.org/search?q=foo) and paging through long lists (http://www.example.org/systems/?start=1000&max=200) — in both of these cases, it’s really OK to use the request parameters instead of tying yourself in a knot trying to avoid them.
Avoid scripting-language file extensions. If your URLs end with “.php”, “.asp”, “.jsp”, “.pl”, “.py”, etc., (a) you’re telling every cracker in the world what exploits to use against you, and (b) the URLs will change when your code does. Use Apache mod-rewrite or equivalent to make your resources look like static files, ending in “.html”, “.xml”, etc.
Avoid cookies and URL rewriting. Well, maybe you can’t, but the idea of REST is that the state is in the thing the server has returned to you (an HTML or XML file, for example) rather than in a session object on the server. This can be tricky with authentication, so you won’t always pull it off, but HTTP authentication (which doesn’t require cookies or session IDs tacked onto URLs) will work surprisingly often. Do what you have to do to make your app work, but don’t use sessions just because your web framework tells you to (they also tie up a lot of resources on your server).
Speculative stuff (skip this)
The strength of REST is that it’s been proven through almost two decades of use on the Web, but not everything that some of the hard-core RESTafarians (and others) try to make us do has been part of that trial. Stop reading now if you just want to go ahead and do something useful with REST. Really, stop! Some of this stuff is moderately interesting, but it won’t really help you, and will probably just mess up your project, or at least make it slower and more expensive.
[maybe some day] Use HTTP PUT to create a resource, and DELETE to get rid of one. These sound like great ideas, and they add a nice symmetry to REST, but they’re just not used enough for us to know if they’d really work on a web scale, and firewalls often block them anyway. In real-life REST applications, rightly or wrongly, people just use POST for creation, modification, and deletion. It’s not as elegant, but we know it works.
[don't bother] Use URLs to point to resources rather than representations. Huh? OK, a resource is a sort-of Platonic ideal of something (e.g. “a picture of Cairo”), while a representation is the resource’s physical manifestation (e.g. “an 800×600 24-bit RGB picture of Cairo in JPEG format”). Yes, as you’d guess, it was people with or working on Ph.D.’s who thought of that. For a long time, the W3C pushed the idea of URLs like “http://www.example.org/pics/cairo” instead of “http://www.example.org/pics/cairo.jpg“, under the assumption that web clients and servers could use content negotiation to decide on the best format to deliver. I guess that people hated the fact that HTTP was so simple, and wanted to find ways to make it more complicated. Fortunately, there were very few nibbles, and this is not a common practice on the web. Screw Plato! Viva materialism! Go ahead and put “.xml” at the end of your URLs.
[blech] Use URNs instead of URLs. I think even the hard-core URN lovers have given up on this now — it’s precisely the kind of excessive abstraction that sent people running screaming from WS-* into REST’s arms in the first place (see also “content negotiation”, above), and it would be a shame to scare them away from REST as well. URLs are fine, as long as you make some minore efforts to ensure that they don’t change.
[n/a] REST needs security, reliable messaging, etc. The RESTafarians don’t say this, but I’m worried that the JSR (the Java REST group) will. We already have a secure version of HTTP TLS/SSL, and it works fine for hundreds of thousands or millions of web sites. Reliable messaging can be handled fine in the application layer, since everyone’s requirements are different anyway, or maybe we want a reliable-messaging spec for HTTP in general. In either case, please don’t pile this stuff on REST.
So to sum up, just give every piece of information its own URL, then have fun.
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