Late to the RESTful party

Apparently, I'm the last fool to really read about it. I only first heard about REST maybe 2 months ago by a long post by one of the rails guys.

Lately (as in the last 6 months), there's been a resurgence in figuring out the HTTP protocol. It's suppose to be RESTful. Mainly, the idea that network architecture are seen as a collection of resources identified uniquely by a URI. And that the whole network application is simply the user in a large state machine, where traversing the different resources equate to state transitions. This has implications of server and client design to be simpler.

Each HTTP request also has a method associated with it. The methods in HTTP most commonly used are GET and POST. In the early days of the web (ie when we were in college), I saw that forms submitted by GET or POST, and for a long time, I had no idea what the difference was. GET is intended to "read" but make no state changes in the server, and POST is intented to make state changes. So doing form submissions with GET is not only semantically wrong, but insecure, since it puts form contents in the url.

In addition to GET and POST, there are others, (I never knew). And the bunch of them map well to CRUD(Create, read, update, delete) operations. And using the native HTTP methods, you can take advantage of things already built into HTTP, like caching (for scalibility) without having to build it yourself.

Here's a simple intro , and I think one of the articles that spawned the discussion. This is the original disseration on RESTful architecture, if you want to read it.

Wilhem has built Annologger, a tool that lets people worship your dentist appointments.