What are the main patterns and/or attributes that make an application RESTful?

Question

What are the main patterns and/or attributes that make an application RESTful?

Answer 1

A plain MVC partterns is good.

Also you have to make sure you split your things into real model (for example for a blog it would be post/comments)

Also you have to use all the HTTP verb so PUT/DELETE/POST/GET.

Answer 2

I think this might answer your question: Representational State Transfer

Answer 3

Doing things RESTfully is actually hard.

At the end of the day, the big attributes are:

1 - URIs represent resources, not actions 2 - HTTP verbs describe what action to take

ie:

GETing http://www.example.com/something/1 will return the something identified by 1 POSTing http://www.example.com/something/1 will update it PUTing http://www.example.com/something will create a new something

3 - The responses to things like GET requests should document other places the client can go.

If a client asks for http://www.example.com/movies/1 (via GET), the response should contain elements that point the client to things related. Like http://www.examples.com/review/movie/1 (which might list reviews of movie #1

This is really rough -- spend a day googling around and reading. Then try to figure out who's really talking about REST, and who's confusing it with basic RPC stuff with simplified URL schemes.

Answer 4

To start with, a RESTful web service must not violate any of the following constraints (described in detail in Roy Fielding's seminal dissertation):

• client-server
• stateless
• cacheable
• uniform interface
• layered system

Of these, 'uniform interface' is particularly important.

Answer 5

A fundamental consideration in REST is to strictly observe the division between "side effect free" methods and ones with side-effects.

Answer 6

1. Understanding the difference between PUT and POST, aka understanding what idempotency means.

2. REST != RPC. There seems to be a lot of resources on the web (such as this one) that seems to think that just because there are multiple representations of a resource, then it is restful. Links such as /API/User/GetUser are not restful.

Answer 7

Hypermedia as the Engine of Application State (HATEOAS). Interpreting REST with a clear grasp of this single constraint will make everything else about REST an order of magnitude easier to understand.