What REST is really about…
Posted in Locality and Space, REST on October 7th, 2007 at 08:28:26REST is really about just one thing: making your resources available in a way that everyone nows how to get to them, change them, and remove them. What does that mean? Well, this is what REST is really about:
66.249.66.20 - - [07/Oct/2007:07:34:06 -0500] "GET /mapping/wpserverdemo/featureserver/featureserver.cgi/scribble/67.html HTTP/1.1" 200 658 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html)"
72.14.199.40 - - [07/Oct/2007:07:36:43 -0400] "GET /atompub/featureserver/featureserver.cgi/scribble/726.atom HTTP/1.1" 200 1182 "-" "Feedfetcher-Google; (+http://www.google.com/feedfetcher.html; 1 subscribers; feed-id=14743344383889883903)" "-"
Google has been slowly crawling through the wpserverdemo HTML pages overnight, and several people have subscribed to the feed or individual features from the AtomPub demo I put together under MetaCarta Labs.
Addressability. Linkability. Shareability. All these things are what the principles of REST are attempting to bring about. Making it so that the things that have worked so well for the web can work for you — things like Google searching, things like syndication, things like web browsers. They’ve worked well for lots of things over the years, and if you’re working on the web, you should consider how to take advantage of that.