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Hacker News Comments on
RESTful Web Services

Leonard Richardson, Sam Ruby, David Heinemeier Hansson · 3 HN comments
HN Books has aggregated all Hacker News stories and comments that mention "RESTful Web Services" by Leonard Richardson, Sam Ruby, David Heinemeier Hansson.
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Amazon Summary
"Every developer working with the Web needs to read this book."-- David Heinemeier Hansson, creator of the Rails framework "RESTful Web Services finally provides a practical roadmap for constructing services that embrace the Web, instead of trying to route around it."-- Adam Trachtenberg, PHP author and EBay Web Services Evangelist You've built web sites that can be used by humans. But can you also build web sites that are usable by machines? That's where the future lies, and that's what RESTful Web Services shows you how to do. The World Wide Web is the most popular distributed application in history, and Web services and mashups have turned it into a powerful distributed computing platform. But today's web service technologies have lost sight of the simplicity that made the Web successful. They don't work like the Web, and they're missing out on its advantages. This book puts the "Web" back into web services. It shows how you can connect to the programmable web with the technologies you already use every day. The key is REST, the architectural style that drives the Web. This book: Emphasizes the power of basic Web technologies -- the HTTP application protocol, the URI naming standard, and the XML markup language Introduces the Resource-Oriented Architecture (ROA), a common-sense set of rules for designing RESTful web services Shows how a RESTful design is simpler, more versatile, and more scalable than a design based on Remote Procedure Calls (RPC) Includes real-world examples of RESTful web services, like Amazon's Simple Storage Service and the Atom Publishing Protocol Discusses web service clients for popular programming languages Shows how to implement RESTful services in three popular frameworks -- Ruby on Rails, Restlet (for Java), and Django (for Python) Focuses on practical issues: how to design and implement RESTful web services and clients This is the first book that applies the REST design philosophy to real web services. It sets down the best practices you need to make your design a success, and the techniques you need to turn your design into working code. You can harness the power of the Web for programmable applications: you just have to work with the Web instead of against it. This book shows you how.
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Hacker News Stories and Comments

All the comments and stories posted to Hacker News that reference this book.
⬐
Fascinating that even here on Hacker News, where we can presume the audience is well-informed about tech matters, the comments on this post show a large amount of confusion about the definition of "RESTful". I see some comments raise the issue of XML versus JSON, as if the encoding format impacts on whether something is RESTful. I see others raising the issue of HATEOAS, with some comments suggesting that RESTful is HATEOAS, and others suggesting that RESTful is a different approach from HATEOAS.

A term that lacks any agreed upon meaning is of no value. But I wonder why the meaning has become so blurry?

I was under the impression that the bible on this subject was the 2007 book by Leonard Richardson, Sam Ruby (and a nice forward by David Heinemeier Hansson):

RESTful Web Services

http://www.amazon.com/RESTful-Web-Services-Leonard-Richardso...

However, reading the comments on this page, I have the impression that many people here have never heard of that book.

⬐ cxa
When I read the title of the post, I wrongly assumed it linked to the "RESTful Web Services Cookbook", which is another O'Reilly classic on this topic. The advice I've heard is to read one or the other, depending on which prose style you prefer.

It's nice to see a CC-licensed effort to create a similar resource. It's unfortunate that the names are so similar.

⬐
If you're learning about REST, do it right and make this book your bible - it's brilliant: http://www.amazon.com/Restful-Web-Services-Leonard-Richardso...
⬐ danellis
Why should that particular book be the bible? I haven't read it, but I've flicked through it and seeing things like the suggestion that clients should "construct" URLs made me doubt its worth.

Shouldn't Fielding's original thesis be the bible?

⬐ stevejalim
Ok, maybe bible was used to loosely. In my experience, I found it a well written, well balanced, useful primer for real-world development of RESTful web services that also has enough depth to make it a reference I've returned to since. That's better.
⬐ dlokshin
Correct link: http://www.amazon.com/Restful-Web-Services-Leonard-Richardso...
⬐ stevejalim
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