"Friends with Benefits": By REST

All the time people are creating new Web applications and trying to push it on the market. Different ideas popup each few seconds. Some years ago most of the Web applications could live “alone”, I mean, without integration/interaction with others, but today? Can you imagine trying to create a “revolutionary”/cool Web application without a “friend approach”? Or even trying to transform your same old application in something on Web 2.0/3.0 without a “friend approach”? I guess no.

I mean around “friend approach” the idea about publishing what your Web application does or knows for others. It is exactly what the marshup idea brings, but it is quite interesting to see how this approach is so natural nowadays in most of people responsible to think in a solution for Web applications.

Looking through the point of view of who want to develop an application that will provide information(resource)/service, I have been taking a look how interesting is a REST Style architecture, of course that it is not my focus to judge about others approach for architectures, like SOAP, specially because each of them has advantages that depends of the context, scenario and several variables.

REST Style can go beyond of the architecture and naturally introduce the idea about client API for interact with your application, then REST provides a convenient bridge between the platform worlds and easier content streaming than SOAP, less work. Moreover, an application that is internet-based and the requirements for security is low, it is best implemented in REST.

Somethings that comes around REST Style:

• Data representation with JSON/XML/ATOM.JSON has been adopting widely, where there are a bundle of API on different languages to deal with it, and how simple is to integrate it on JS objects on browser, for example on XMLHTTPRequest.
• Resources are manipulated by HTTP verbs (GET, PUT, POST, DELETE).
• Security, based on HTTP. But a common security/identity approaches like OpenID and OAuth has been adopting day in day out, in a simple way to work with tokens for example. Basically it allows your REST Style solution to adopt different kind of authentication providers(Like GMail for example).
• Caching is an interesting part of a REST Style, and can be used by both server side and client side. On the server-side infrastructure can be plugged a cache mechanism to “intercept” and include the ability to deal with caching headers avoid consume resource on the server infrastructure and increasing response time to the client.

REST has proven itself to be simple, flexible and scalable. Depending the way that you address to implement the REST Style and the design you do, you can really add more advantages for your solution, taking in the possibility to spread easily the components that deals with the services/resources in a CDN way, getting performance, better response time trip and distributing.