My last post on REST generated some attention. Since it is an important topic, I wanted to share some additional links for those who are trying to improve their understanding of REST:
- Stefan Tilkov's Intro to REST presentation and When is an API RESTful?
- Dare Obasanjo's Explaining REST to Damien Katz
- Paul Precod's Second Generation Web Services, REST and the Real World, SOAP, REST and Interoperability
- Tim Bray's The Sun Cloud and REST, as in Take It Easy
- More stuff from Roger Costello
- Ryan Tomayko's How I Explained REST to My Wife
- Roy T. Fielding's Dissertation: Chapter 5
REST reflects the architecture of the Web. One of its most important characteristics (and there are many) is that it is "stateless". That means that a REST style command from a requestor to a responder has everything in it the responder needs to know in order to take an action. No further handshaking is required. Very efficient and Web like. Since it is "stateless" it works very well with a "stateless" server architecture, in order to achieve Web scale. In this way many clients can interact with many servers against a large pool of objects to accomplish many interactions, well, you get the point, Web scale. That's one reason we use RESTful Web Services API commands to access the Mezeo Cloud Storage Platform servers, which are also stateless architectures, implemented via Linux. Web scale, one of the requirements of cloud.
REST is also highly efficient, so that interactions between requestors and responders via a network can be done with a minimum of overhead. If you ever download a 500 gigabyte file via a cable modem based internet connection, you will likely appreciate any efficiency that can be achieved. Speaking of efficiency, REST also accommodates caching, at both the client and the server, which can dramatically improve the efficiency of your interactions with the "object" (an object could be, for example, a file, like a picture, or a pdf).
Developers who utilize RESTful Web Services APIs to create applications appreciate the efficiency and capability of the APIs. Expect, over time, to see more commonality among base case APIs and other APIs that expose storage cloud specific advanced services. For example, Mezeo based clouds offer a secure share, collaboration, notifications, and nested files and folders, for example. Some clouds may have such a unique set of APIs that others will create translators (wrappers, for the IT guys in the audience) for them, and we will continue to make headway on openness.
RESTful APIs are a critical part of new application development, and represent the delivery of Service Oriented Architecture infrastructure for storage. Storage is now programmable. And I bet you thought cloud storage was just a utility computing model applied to storage, for scalability and pay for use. Both are necessary, but not sufficient for cloud storage.
- Stefan Tilkov's Intro to REST presentation and When is an API RESTful?
- Dare Obasanjo's Explaining REST to Damien Katz
- Paul Precod's Second Generation Web Services, REST and the Real World, SOAP, REST and Interoperability
- Tim Bray's The Sun Cloud and REST, as in Take It Easy
- More stuff from Roger Costello
- Ryan Tomayko's How I Explained REST to My Wife
- Roy T. Fielding's Dissertation: Chapter 5
REST reflects the architecture of the Web. One of its most important characteristics (and there are many) is that it is "stateless". That means that a REST style command from a requestor to a responder has everything in it the responder needs to know in order to take an action. No further handshaking is required. Very efficient and Web like. Since it is "stateless" it works very well with a "stateless" server architecture, in order to achieve Web scale. In this way many clients can interact with many servers against a large pool of objects to accomplish many interactions, well, you get the point, Web scale. That's one reason we use RESTful Web Services API commands to access the Mezeo Cloud Storage Platform servers, which are also stateless architectures, implemented via Linux. Web scale, one of the requirements of cloud.
REST is also highly efficient, so that interactions between requestors and responders via a network can be done with a minimum of overhead. If you ever download a 500 gigabyte file via a cable modem based internet connection, you will likely appreciate any efficiency that can be achieved. Speaking of efficiency, REST also accommodates caching, at both the client and the server, which can dramatically improve the efficiency of your interactions with the "object" (an object could be, for example, a file, like a picture, or a pdf).
Developers who utilize RESTful Web Services APIs to create applications appreciate the efficiency and capability of the APIs. Expect, over time, to see more commonality among base case APIs and other APIs that expose storage cloud specific advanced services. For example, Mezeo based clouds offer a secure share, collaboration, notifications, and nested files and folders, for example. Some clouds may have such a unique set of APIs that others will create translators (wrappers, for the IT guys in the audience) for them, and we will continue to make headway on openness.
RESTful APIs are a critical part of new application development, and represent the delivery of Service Oriented Architecture infrastructure for storage. Storage is now programmable. And I bet you thought cloud storage was just a utility computing model applied to storage, for scalability and pay for use. Both are necessary, but not sufficient for cloud storage.
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