RESTful Web Services and Drupal

Presented by Greg Hines

E.g. SOAP, XML-RPC

E.g. REST

REST itself isn’t complicated.Defining REST is.

Yet.

• A blog post• A collection of blog posts• An image• A user• Map coordinates• A bank transaction• Search results

Every resource has at least one URI;every URI points to a resource.

http://example.com/blog/2008/05/14/restful-web-services-and-drupal

http://example.com/blog/2008/05

http://example.com/

Response Codes– 200 OK– 404 Not Found– 500 Internal Server Error

There are 39 response codes (plus two not in current use)

• HTTP is stateless by design

• HTTP is stateless by design• Every HTTP request happens in isolation

• HTTP is stateless by design• Every HTTP request happens in isolation• There are two kinds of state in a RESTful web service…

Resources link to each other:

<a href="http://example.com/resource/3">...</a>

Resources link to each other:

<a href="http://example.com/resource/3">...</a>

<link rel="alternate" type="application/atom+xml" href="http://example.com/resource/2.atom" />

Resources link to each other:

<a href="http://example.com/resource/3">...</a>

<link rel="alternate" type="application/atom+xml" href="http://example.com/resource/2.atom" />

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?><resource xmlns="http://example.com/ns/resource"> <content>...</content> <nextResource href="http://example.com/resource/3"/> <prevResource href="http://example.com/resource/1"/></resource>

(Sort of.)

An appeal to authority or argument by authority is a type of argument in logic consisting on basing the truth value of an assertion on the authority, knowledge, expertise, or position of the person asserting it.

–Wikipedia

• Co-founder, chairman of the Apache Software Foundation• Co-founder of the Apache HTTP Project• On IETF working groups for HTTP, URI, and HTML– Architectural principal on HTTP working group – First name on HTTP spec

• Originator of REST

• User Management

• User Management• Resource Management

• User Management• Resource Management• Routing

• Multiple Representations for Resources

• Multiple Representations for Resources• Content Negotiation