Ever since Fielding published his dissertation
on Architectural Styles and the Design of Network-based Software Architectures, the momentum behind the Representational State Transfer (REST) architectural style has been building apace. Of course, as with the many new technologies, practices and theories adopted by the software industry, REST is progressing along what Gartner call the ‘Hype Cycle‘.
Since Fielding’s dissertation, REST has been adopted widely by the software industry and a number of frameworks have evolved that support the development of RESTful services on today’s platforms. The availability of frameworks to simplify the implementation of RESTful services has further accelerated the adoption of REST.
As with any new technology, creating frameworks that make it easy to adopt that technology can, and in the case of REST has, become a double edge sword. I say this because making technology adoption easy also makes it easy for those implementing that technology to get by with a minimum of understanding. ‘REST in Practice’ aims to inform those adopting REST by providing a compressive guide to REST and building the readers knowledge progressively from start to finish.
