Simple non-programmer explanation of REST architecture

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31 points·jgamman··6 comments

this was enough for me to appreciate why everyone was shoving it in their titles...

I've been trying to wrap my head around REST for a while - I found the Wikipedia article to be helpful - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Representational_State_Transfer

I've met a couple of people who didn't get a lot out of the wikipedia article. I usually direct them to these instead:

* http://www.infoq.com/articles/rest-introduction * http://rest.blueoxen.net/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?RestInPlainEnglish

There is also this from awhile ago http://tomayko.com/writings/rest-to-my-wife

Okay, so I'm a student new to REST. Yet it seems obvious. And simple.

I would have found it helpful to see description of what behavior would constitute NONrestful behavior. POSTs? POSTs that are used for navigation instead of submitting information?

Anti-REST behavior is generally using POST exclusively. and using a contrived XML format instead of using ANY headers at all. All requests go to the same motherfucking URL, and all responses are "200 OK" with the same Content-Type. The only hypertext used is for XML schema definitions, all references are as magic strings.

For prominent examples see: SOAP, XML-RPC, and WS-*

I hope Dave Winer's head falls off.

It's a good article, but it's a bit of a stretch to call it a "non-programmer explanation".

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