5.9. Conclusion

I’ve now got a design for a map web service that’s simple enough for a client to use without a lot of up-front investment, and useful enough to be the driver for any number of useful programs. It’s so closely attuned to the philosophy of the Web that you can use it with a web browser. It’s RESTful and resource-oriented. It’s addressable, stateless, and well connected.

It’s also read-only. It assumes that my clients have nothing to offer but their insatiable appetites for my data. Lots of existing web services work this way, but read-only web services are only half the story. In the next chapter I’ll show you how clients can use HTTP’s uniform interface to create new resources of their own.