RESTful Web Services: The Keep-It-Simple Style

first wrote an XML-over-HTTP web service almost a decade ago. At that time, it seemed a completely natural solution to a practical business problem: provisioning web-based, product-pricing quotes. As web services became a formal technology with numerous standards, I became somewhat weary of the true usefulness of the technology. It grew so complex and institutionalized that it carried a significant learning curve and required considerable investment in the infrastructure. I often wondered what happened to my primitive XML-over-HTTP/S services, and why they were not good solutions anymore. They worked perfectly well for my application—a major e-business site serving a great number of diverse businesses across the globe.

Then two years ago I had a revelation: my good, old style of web services design was back and it now had a formal name—REST (Representational State Transfer). It was documented in the doctoral work of Roy Fielding, primary architect of HTTP 1.1 and co-founder of the Apache HTTP server project. Since then, I have effectively adopted REST as my architectural style for web services, and I have successfully applied it on multiple occasions.