Chapter 4. The Resource-Oriented Architecture

I’ve shown you the power of REST, but I haven’t shown you in any systematic way how that power is structured or how to expose it. In this chapter I outline a concrete RESTful architecture: the Resource-Oriented Architecture (ROA). The ROA is a way of turning a problem into a RESTful web service: an arrangement of URIs, HTTP, and XML that works like the rest of the Web, and that programmers will enjoy using.

In Chapter 1 I classified RESTful web services by their answers to two questions. These answers correspond to two of the four defining features of REST:

• The scoping information (“why should the server send this data instead of that data?”) is kept in the URI. This is the principle of addressability.

• The method information (“why should the server send this data instead of deleting it?”) is kept in the HTTP method. There are only a few HTTP methods, and everyone knows ahead of time what they do. This is the principle of the uniform interface.

In this chapter I introduce the moving parts of the Resource-Oriented Architecture: resources (of course), their names, their representations, and the links between them. I explain and promote the properties of the ROA: addressability, statelessness, connectedness, and the uniform interface. I show how the web technologies (HTTP, URIs, and XML) implement the moving parts to make the properties possible.

In the previous chapters I illustrated concepts by pointing to existing web services, like S3. I continue that tradition in this chapter, but I’ll also illustrate concepts by pointing to existing web sites. Hopefully I’ve convinced you by now that web sites are web services, and that many web applications (such as search engines) are RESTful web services. When I talk about abstract concepts like addressability, it’s useful to show you real URIs, which you can type into your web browser to see the concepts in action.