Over the years, REST has grown in popularity as the preferred way of publishing and consuming web services. The REST architecture lends itself well to building scalable, implementation-agnostic systems that offer services over the web to a diverse set of clients. However, it’s also widely misunderstood – Ever come across someone claiming to know REST refer to it as “a standard protocol”? Designing an API that conforms to the REST principles is a non-trivial task that can get quite challenging especially for complex web services. Often times, we end up having to deal with APIs that are “somewhat RESTful” in nature. This talk discusses the basic tenets behind an effective RESTful Interface. We discuss the design patterns, anti-patterns, recommendations and common pitfalls. I am not a “RESTafarian”. The talk intends to be a practical guide based on my experiences designing many simple and intuitive RESTful interfaces.This is a talk for anyone involved in building client-server systems.
Priya Rajagopal (Twitter: @rajagp)