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InfoQ eMag: REST

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Over the past 15 years, the term REST has been used a lot: it’s been compared to Web Services, used within the context of Cloud, and the every day Web. Even today, misconceptions and misunderstandings still abound. Some equate REST to HTTP; however, there are many non-RESTful HTTP services out there.  And of course, there are issues around HATEOS, idempotency, versioning of services, etc.
In this eMag you will learn about these and other important aspects of REST.

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Contents of the REST eMag include:

  • A Brief Introduction to REST - 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.
  • What Is REST? - In this presentation summary you'll learn precisely what REST is, and is not, about as well as the background of REST that caused it to be defined. You'll also see how Mike covers the key principles behind REST, such as HATEOAS as well as tries to debunk some of the myths behind what is and is not a RESTful service.
  • How to GET a Cup of Coffee - Jim Webber, Savas Parastatidis and Ian Robinson show how to drive an application's flow through the use of hypermedia in a RESTful application, using the well-known example from Gregor Hohpe's "Starbucks does not use Two-Phase-Commit" to illustrate how the Web's concepts can be used for integration purposes.
  • REST Anti-Patterns - 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.
  • RESTful Java Evolves - In Bill's session he covers how best to write RESTful services in Java using the JAX-RS standard. He goes into detail about the various annotations and options that JAX-RS 2.0 provides as well as what drove their development. By the end of this you will understand JAX-RS and at least be able to do further deep dives for yourself with the copious materials found on InfoQ or elsewhere.

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