What exactly is RESTful programming?

Question

What exactly is RESTful programming?

Answer 1

A great book on REST is REST in Practice.

Must reads are Representational State Transfer (REST) and REST APIs must be hypertext-driven

See Martin Fowlers article the Richardson Maturity Model (RMM) for an explanation on what an RESTful service is.

To be RESTful a Service needs to fulfill the Hypermedia as the Engine of Application State. (HATEOAS), that is, it needs to reach level 3 in the RMM, read the article for details or the slides from the qcon talk.

The HATEOAS constraint is an acronym for Hypermedia as the Engine of Application State. This principle is the key differentiator between a REST and most other forms of client server system.

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A client of a RESTful application need only know a single fixed URL to access it. All future actions should be discoverable dynamically from hypermedia links included in the representations of the resources that are returned from that URL. Standardized media types are also expected to be understood by any client that might use a RESTful API. (From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia)

REST Litmus Test for Web Frameworks is a similar maturity test for web frameworks.

Approaching pure REST: Learning to love HATEOAS is a good collection of links.

REST versus SOAP for the Public Cloud discusses the current levels of REST usage.

REST and versioning discusses Extensibility, Versioning, Evolvability, etc. through Modifiability