RESTful Web Services Cookbook: Solutions for Improving Scalability and Simplicity [Paperback]

Subbu Allamaraju (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: March 11, 2010

While the REST design philosophy has captured the imagination of web and enterprise developers alike, using this approach to develop real web services is no picnic. This cookbook includes more than 100 recipes to help you take advantage of REST, HTTP, and the infrastructure of the Web. You'll learn ways to design RESTful web services for client and server applications that meet performance, scalability, reliability, and security goals, no matter what programming language and development framework you use.

Each recipe includes one or two problem statements, with easy-to-follow, step-by-step instructions for solving them, as well as examples using HTTP requests and responses, and XML, JSON, and Atom snippets. You'll also get implementation guidelines, and a discussion of the pros, cons, and trade-offs that come with each solution.

• Learn how to design resources to meet various application scenarios
• Successfully design representations and URIs
• Implement the hypertext constraint using links and link headers
• Understand when and how to use Atom and AtomPub
• Know what and what not to do to support caching
• Learn how to implement concurrency control
• Deal with advanced use cases involving copying, merging, transactions, batch processing, and partial updates
• Secure web services and support OAuth

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Subbu Allamaraju is a Principal Member of Staff at eBay. See linkedin.com/in/subbu for his latest profile.

Product Details

• Paperback: 316 pages
• Publisher: Yahoo Press; 1 edition (March 11, 2010)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0596801688
• ISBN-13: 978-0596801687
• Product Dimensions: 7 x 0.6 x 9.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (11 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #25,727 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #9 in Books > Computers & Technology > Networking > Data in the Enterprise > Client-Server Systems
  • #24 in Books > Computers & Technology > Web Development & Design > Web Services
  • #87 in Books > Computers & Technology > Web Development & Design > Programming

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

21 of 22 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Serious REST June 1, 2010

By J. Fahey

Format:Paperback

As is common with O'Reilly's Cookbooks, the style of this book is very terse and to the point. There is not much handholding. The intended audience seems to be system architects who already know what they are doing, but who need to know what they should be aiming for when they want to be RESTful. The "recipes" in this Cookbook are more like Best Practices, since figuring out how to implement them is left as an excercise for the reader.

Compared to my previous readings on REST, this book strongly emphasizes the use of consistent XML formats. For me, this was the most important lesson in the book. It is not enough to just use PUT and DELETE: in order to really think in terms of "representations," you need to design meaningful XML. Along these lines, Allamaraju's discussion of the Atom protocol is particularly interesting.

15 of 16 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Easy to read, packed full of details and great presentation. August 3, 2011

By Riyad Kalla VINE™ VOICE

Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase

I had been following "What is REST" tutorials online for the last few weeks as I was working on an API for an upcoming SaaS product. Unfortunately there were still some nitty-gritty details behind the tenants of RESTful design that weren't clicking in my brain, making it hard for me to really grok if I was following the intended design guidelines correctly or just faking it like so many other services do.

Picking this book up after a recommendation from an HN reader, I got 4 chapters in before the smoke cleared in my brain and I had multiple "Ah ha!" moments such that the whole concept cleared up for me in a matter of days.

It could be the writing style or presentation, but I just found it really easy to digest and answering all my questions as they popped up in my head.

An excellent resource for anyone else working on RESTful API design.

12 of 14 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars Good book to get up to speed quick on RESTful March 18, 2010

By Hugh Watkins VINE™ VOICE

Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase

I have not made it through the whole book, but my first impressions are really good. One of the interfaces we were designing for work is to time consuming to wait for a http response, in the first chapter of this book it gives you the way to do Asynchronous requests correctly with rest.

There is also some good information on presenting resources that are not nouns, nouns are easy right you have a collection of people for example, you want to list all the people and do CRUD operations on a particular person. This to me is classical rest and is strait forward to do, but what about verbs (not in the POST, DELETE http sense) but in the give me driving directions sense. The book covers this and actually uses driving directions as it's example.

There are a couple of issues I'm still trying to find covered in the book, like how to do pagination on a collection of resources correctly. There is at least one recipe on this, but I did not see how to indicate a default page size (ie I requested all user accounts, but only returned first 200 dues to size, how does the client know that 200 were returned)

The other thing is the proper way to use http get parameters in search and other limiting operations. It would be nice to have some basic recipes there, but to be fair I might just not have seen them yet.

All in all it's a nice addition to your technical library.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Get it just for the security chapter June 20, 2011

By Manuel Rodriguez

Format:Paperback

This book provides a clear and concise description of REST and how to make your web services accesible via REST. I got the book because I was struggling with authenticating a Restful web service. The chapter on security is worth the price of the book. I finally understood OAuth's three-legged and two-legged protocols, and was able to build a protected web service API. The book is not tied to a specific programming language, which I think is good as it focuses on core concepts instead. It was easy for me to work on Python and Javascript to get the OAuth operation in place.

7 of 9 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Best book on REST September 19, 2010

By Oddleif

Format:Paperback

If you are looking for a book on REST I will highly recommend RESTful Web Services Cookbook by Subbu Allamaraju. As the title sais, it's a cookbook for REST and a great starting point for anyone starting with rest or looking for more insight into the best practices on how to implement RESTful web services.

The main focus is on the architecture and concepts, not the specific implementation details for any different language. Truly a book outlining the foundations for a lasting technology.

If you are looking for a book telling you how to implement REST in Java or C# or Ruby or any other language, this is not the book you are looking for.

3 of 4 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars AWESOME Book for Proper Design/Architecture/Standards Compliance March 5, 2012

By infolock

Format:Paperback

All I can say is, this book ROCKS. A thorough, in-depth approach that takes you not only to the high-level perspectives to understand what REST is and what is required, but also a lower level best practices approach to making solid architectural decisions for your code.

It also uses the approach of relating potential/real world problems, followed by solutions that explain how to solve the problem, what the problem was, and why the solution is the best approach through reference to design and standards.

Great book. If you have a basic concept as to what REST is and are looking for guidance to that next step for proper architecture/design solutions, then this it he book for you.

5 of 7 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Best quick read on REST March 12, 2011

By MS

Format:Paperback

It is a cook book and proves to be one. Quick to read and easy to understand with ample examples. Even after reading several chapters of "RESTFul webservices" and "REST in Action" I was still not comfortable with RESTful design. This cook book with its series of question+answer style approach was spot on.