Stefan Tilkov discusses REST (Representational State Transfer) and RESTful web services based upon work he has done for clients of his consultancy. Stefan talks about the shortcomings of the WS-* specs and says he sees little need for WS-* web services any more. Stefan also talks about how web development frameworks are beginning to map to the RESTful model, and the concept of REST and security.
In this interview from QCon San Francisco 2008, Ian Robinson discusses REST vs. WS-*, REST contracts, WADL, how to approach company-wide SOA initiatives, how an SOA changes a company, SOA and Agile, tool support for REST, reuse and foreseeing client needs, versioning and the future of REST-based services in enterprise SOA development.
In this presentation, recorded at QCon London, Stefan Tilkov introduces the key principles of REST, explaining the differences to other distributed systems architectures and highlighting its benefits. Topics covered include mapping business logic to resource interactions, hypermedia, and documentation.
Explaining HATEOAS is notoriously tricky, In an effort to make it easier, Nick Gall explores the idea of describing it as an engine for domain specific protocol-description.
The W3C has released a report about the results of the Workshop on the Web of Services for Enterprise Computing, which was held in February.
Thomas Steiner, author of the REST Describe & Compile tool, which creates a WADL description from existing REST messages and can generate code from WADL, answers InfoQ's questions.
Following up on the debate of REST vs. WS-* discussed here last week, it is interesting to note a debate about "contracts" for RESTful services that has been picking up pace over the last few days.
Many REST API description languages exist but none have seen major uptake; recently WADL has been getting more attention. Yahoo!'s Mark Nottingham is maintaining a stylesheet to generate docs from WADL. Google's Thomas Steiner unveiled plans for a Google project for generating language specific clients from WADL, & generateing WADL from documentation. Sun is adding WADL tools to SDWP.
