You Look Like You Could Use Some REST!


Same title as my talk for php|works this year, but not the same material. This talk is a cobbled together, Frankenstein’s monster of three previous talks I’ve given that have covered representational state transfer (REST). Learn about REST as I breeze through it, and spend the last half of the talk attempting to solicit audience participation from the morning zombies—er, campers—(who may feel that they lack rest) to design a RESTful web service.

Description of the talk I’ll give at php|works next month follows:

Representational State Transfer, or REST, has become the hip, new buzzword of Web 2.0. But what really makes an application RESTful? Is it pretty URLs? Or the use of XML over HTTP? Is it any web service that doesn’t use SOAP? In all of the hype, the definition of REST has become clouded and diluted.

It’s time to take a fresh look at REST. In this talk, Ben Ramsey reintroduces REST and its architectural style. He shows that REST is not only an architecture for web services but that it describes an architecture for the Web. Ramsey will demonstrate how statelessness, a resource-oriented architecture, atomicity of requests, and other traits of REST make the most of the Web’s architecture to provide scalable and simpler web services turning the Web into a platform by which rich clients can access and manipulate data.