Real world guide on using and/or setting up REST web services?

Question

I've only used XML RPC and I haven't really delved into SOAP but I'm trying to find a good comprehensive guide, with real world examples or even a walkthrough of some minimal REST application.

I'm most comfortable with Python/PHP.

Answer 1

I like the examples in the Richardson & Ruby book, "RESTful Web Services" from O'Reilly.

Answer 2

There is a good example with the Google App Engine Documentation. http://code.google.com/appengine/articles/rpc.html. It also talks you through some security aspects of doing REST

Answer 3

Here are a few links:

• http://www.infoq.com/articles/webber-rest-workflow
• http://microformats.org/wiki/rest/urls
• http://blog.feedly.com/2009/05/06/best-practices-for-building-json-rest-web-services/
• http://barelyenough.org/blog/2008/05/versioning-rest-web-services/
• http://bitworking.org/news/restful_json/

(I should note, that the last one uses relative url's - a practise I don't like. But the rest of the article is very good, so I linked it anyway.)