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Filed under Architecture on November 22, 2006 by Avi Flax

Finally, a REST Book!

I was very excited to stumble across a link to the book REST Web Services, by Leonard Richardson and Sam Ruby, which is slated to be released in May 2007. It can't come soon enough for me.

I've been building REST web services for about a year now, and I was interested in the style well beforehand. Over the past year, I've become increasingly enamoured of the style, and I've enthusiastically embraced it as the way to build web services and APIs. I've gone so far as to become Arc's Architect for Services, with the mandate to ensure that all our web APIs follow RESTful principles and design patterns.

The single biggest problem with REST has been a lack of clearly established best practices that an initiate could follow to get up to speed with the style quickly. Until now, someone wanting to create a REST service had to start with the dissertation, then a Q & A, a marital dialogue, and a FAQ - before they were ready to peruse hundreds of messages at rest-discuss. It's an exhausting series of hurdles to jump over; it's no wonder that adoption of REST has been slow and uneven.

But lately things have started getting much better, rapidly. There's now a publicly available example of a best-practices REST API, Blinksale's. And REST is getting all sorts of high-profile attention. (Interestingly, much of the recent writing has been in the form of dialogue, which isn't as common as it should be in net-tech circles. Ryan Tomayko should get a lot of credit for kicking that off.)

I have high hopes that this book will firmly establish REST as a practical, effective architectural style, one that's as mature in its application as in its theory. I'm really looking forward to seeing it!

Now, since we're finally getting practice cemented down on top of the ideas, it's time for some better tool support! More on that later.

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