Simon Willison's Weblog: rest

Is Node.js a strong platform to use to build a RESTful API platform?

2011-01-30T09:17:00+00:00

My answer to Is Node.js a strong platform to use to build a RESTful API platform? on Quora

Yes. It's very, very good at speaking HTTP.

Why do some websites implement their logout link as a form post via JavaScript versus a plain old GET request?

2010-10-16T11:47:00+00:00

My answer to Why do some websites implement their logout link as a form post via JavaScript versus a plain old GET request? on Quora

Probably because if you implement logout as a GET action, I can force you to log out of a site by tricking you in to visiting a page with an <img src="http://yoursite.com/logout/" width="1" height="1"> element on it.

Tags: javascript, rest, security, web-development, quora

Closure Compiler Service

2010-08-09T13:17:00+00:00

Closure Compiler Service

A hosted version of the Google Closure Compiler (JavaScript minifier) running on App Engine. It has both a user interface and a REST API, which means you can use it as part of an automated build process without needing to set up a local copy of the software.

Via Django snippets

Tags: apis, closure, google, javascript, minification, rest, recovered

Elastic Search

2010-02-11T18:33:14+00:00

Elastic Search

Solr has competition! Like Solr, Elastic Search provides a RESTful JSON HTTP interface to Lucene. The focus here is on distribution, auto-sharding and high availability. It’s even easier to get started with than Solr, partly due to the focus on providing a schema-less document store, but it’s currently missing out on a bunch of useful Solr features (a web interface and faceting are the two that stand out). The high availability features look particularly interesting. UPDATE: I was incorrect, basic faceted queries are already supported.

Via ElasticSearch blog

Tags: elasticsearch, http, java, json, lucene, rest, scaling, search, sharding, solr

Announcing Alice and Wonderland

2009-07-17T09:12:45+00:00

Announcing Alice and Wonderland

Continuing the RabbitMQ “stuff to do with rabbits” naming convention, Alice is a RESTful interface to RabbitMQ which exposes information about vhosts/queues/users/exchanges/etc as JSON. Wonderland is a web UI for RabbitMQ implemented as a pure Ajax application which calls Alice.

Tags: ajax, alice, aliceinwonderland, javascript, json, message-queues, queues, rabbitmq, rest, wonderland

Installing Django, Solr, Varnish and Supervisord with Buildout

2009-06-07T13:54:44+00:00

Installing Django, Solr, Varnish and Supervisord with Buildout

Useful, detailed instructions... but I still think this stuff is Way Too Difficult at the moment. I’m a big fan of the idea of sites that are assembled from multiple smaller web services talking HTTP to each other, but ensuring all the moving parts stay running is massively more painful than just running Apache and MySQL.

Tags: apache, bertrand-mathieu, buildout, django, mysql, operations, python, rest, solr, supervisord, sysadmin, varnish

resty

2009-05-18T13:07:09+00:00

resty

58 lines of bash provides a better command-line interface to RESTful APIs, using curl under the hood. This should save me from running “man curl” several times a week.

Tags: apis, bash, cli, curl, rest, resty

django-piston

2009-04-30T19:55:15+00:00

django-piston

Promising looking Django mini-framework for creating RESTful APIs, from the bitbucket team. Ticks all of Jacob’s boxes, even including built-in pluggable authentication support with HTTP Basic, Digest and OAuth out of the box.

Tags: apis, authentication, bitbucket, digest, django, jespernoehr, oauth, piston, python, rest, restful

REST worst practices

2009-04-30T19:53:12+00:00

REST worst practices

Jacob Kaplan-Moss’ thoughts on the characteristics of a well designed Django REST API library, from November 2008.

Tags: django, jacob-kaplan-moss, python, rest

Quoting Dare Obasanjo

2008-10-24T13:39:11+00:00

The key thing to remember is that REST is about building software that scales to usage on the World Wide Web by being a good participant of the Web ecosystem. Ideally a RESTful API should be designed to be implementable by thousands of websites and consumed by hundreds of applications running on dozens of platforms with zero coupling between the client applications and the Web services.

— Dare Obasanjo

Tags: dare-obasanjo, rest, web-services

Magnificent Seven - the value of Atom

2008-10-19T22:24:21+00:00

Magnificent Seven - the value of Atom

The seven core things that Atom solves so that you don’t have to.

Tags: atom, bill-de-hora, rest, xml

Bloom Filter Resources

2008-10-19T22:22:19+00:00

Bloom Filter Resources

A continuation of the discussion about how to transfer information about a large number of recently updated resources around in an efficient way, Joe provides working code illustrating a simple approach using bloom filters.

Tags: bloom-filters, hashing, joe-gregorio, rest

Versioning REST Web Services

2008-10-13T12:45:13+00:00

Versioning REST Web Services

Peter Williams suggests using a vendor MIME media type in the Accept header to specify a required API version, because embedding the API version in the URL itself leads to a single resource ending up with many different URLs, one for each API version.

Tags: accept, contentnegotiation, http, peter-williams, rest, urls, versioning

RestView - a class for creating a view that dispatches based on request.method

2008-09-21T20:47:16+00:00

RestView - a class for creating a view that dispatches based on request.method

I finally got around to writing up a simple approach I’ve been using for REST-style view functions in Django that dispatch based on request.method.

Via Getting RESTful with web.py

Tags: django, django-snippets, python, rest, restful, restview, views

Dare left something out (and it's important)

2008-08-18T09:39:16+00:00

Dare left something out (and it's important)

Dave Winer: “You should at least learn the lessons and add to REST what it needs to catch up with XML-RPC. Seriously. What’s missing in REST, btw, is a standard method of serializing structs, lists and scalar types.” That would be JSON.

Tags: dare-obasanjo, dave-winer, json, rest, xml-rpc

Explaining REST to Damien Katz

2008-08-17T23:19:32+00:00

Explaining REST to Damien Katz

I didn’t know that it was Mark Baker back in 2002 who first pointed out that SOAP was flawed because it ignored the architecture of the Web as defined by Roy Fielding’s Ph.D thesis.

Tags: damien-katz, dare-obasanjo, history, mark-baker, rest, royfielding, soap

REST, I just don't get it

2008-08-15T08:20:04+00:00

REST, I just don't get it

Read the comments for some excellent practical reasons to care about REST, including cache management (PUT and DELETE can expire the cache entries for the corresponding GET), the ability to add or move parts of the server API without redeploying client libraries and the idempotency of GET / PUT / DELETE and HEAD (repeated POST operations may have side-effects).

Tags: caching, damien-katz, delete, get, idempotency, post, put, rest

Quoting Damien Katz

2008-08-15T08:07:06+00:00

If it's easy to make all your calls conform to the RESTful verb architecture, then that's good, I guess. But if not, then just use a POST as an RPC call, keep it as simple as possible and be done with it. And don't spend another minute worrying about being RESTful or not.

— Damien Katz

Tags: damien-katz, http, post, rest, restful, rpc, web-services

What is it like to write a technical book?

2008-06-20T08:18:53+00:00

What is it like to write a technical book?

Plenty of food for thought from the lead author of the new edition of High Performance MySQL. It’s amazing how Word is still an integral part of most technical book projects despite its obvious inadequacies compared to a toolchain based on plain text files and Subversion (the Django Book used ReST and Subversion to great effect).

Tags: baron-schwartz, django, plaintext, rest, subversion, word, writing

Persevere adds Comet Support

2008-05-13T08:09:29+00:00

Persevere adds Comet Support

Persevere sounds neat: a RESTful HTTP/JSON data store (the interface reminds me of CouchDB) which recently gained the ability to “subscribe” to a resource and receive notifications of updates via comet.

Tags: comet, couchdb, javascript, json, persevere, rest, restful

Multi-Inflection-Point Alert

2008-04-26T18:48:57+00:00

Multi-Inflection-Point Alert

Dammit, Tim, stop giving away our competitive advantages!

Tags: bigtable, couchdb, java, python, rails, rest, simpledb, soap, tim-bray

Quoting Ryan Tomayko

2008-01-13T23:34:19+00:00

I've never heard anyone from the REST camp claim that building distributed systems was "easy". [...] The WS-* folks have historically been obsessed with making things easy, usually for an imaginary business analyst who is nowhere near as technically adept as they. The REST folks, on the other hand, seem much more interested in keeping the entire stack simple, and for everyone involved.

— Ryan Tomayko

Tags: rest, ryan-tomayko, simplicity, web-services, ws-star

A Taxonomy of Event- and REST-based Comet

2007-11-21T20:18:13+00:00

A Taxonomy of Event- and REST-based Comet

Kris Zyp describes a conceptual model for Comet messages based on REST semantics (so you can send a PUT referencing a specific URI down to a client to represent an idempotent state change).

Tags: comet, http, idempotent, javascript, kriszyp, put, rest

[Release] CouchDB 0.7.0

2007-11-17T00:25:10+00:00

[Release] CouchDB 0.7.0

This is a huge milestone for the project—it’s the first official release to include the JSON REST API instead of XML, and it’s also the first release that is “intended for widespread use”.

Tags: couchdb, jan-lehnardt, json, releases, rest, xml

Quoting Assaf Arkin

2007-09-10T10:58:59+00:00

REST plays the same role as open source and open APIs: It eliminates tooling and vendoring as artificial barriers to adoption.

— Assaf Arkin

Tags: assaf-arkin, rest

The Python docs have been redesigned for 2.6

2007-08-18T12:39:51+00:00

The Python docs have been redesigned for 2.6

They’re beautiful. The docs for a module are on a single page now (rather than splitting over multiple pages), they’ve added unobtrusive permalinks to individual sections and the whole thing is built on ReST rather than LaTeX.

Tags: documentation, latex, python, rest

Wesabi: Your bank has a REST API now

2007-07-12T17:20:48+00:00

Wesabi: Your bank has a REST API now

Excellent—I’ve been saying for a while now that I’d really love to be able to program my bank account.

Tags: api, banking, rest, wesabi

Quoting Elliotte Rusty Harold

2007-07-07T09:40:37+00:00

WS-* is North Korea and REST is South Korea. While REST will go on to become an economic powerhouse with steadily increasing standards of living for all its citizens, WS-* is doomed to sixty years of starvation, poverty, tyranny, and defections until it eventually collapses from its own fundamental inadequacies and is absorbed into the more sensible policies of its neighbor to the South.

— Elliotte Rusty Harold

Tags: elliotte-rusty-harold, korea, northkorea, rest, southkorea, web-services, ws-star

RESTify DayTrader

2007-06-21T13:44:19+00:00

RESTify DayTrader

Killer REST case study from Joe Gregorio.

Tags: daytrader, joe-gregorio, rest

Quoting Tim Bray

2007-05-02T20:23:38+00:00

People don't recognize how important URIs are. The notion that you have a huge, world-scale, information space, and that everything in it has an name and they're all just short strings that you can paint on the side of a bus; that's a new thing and a good thing.

— Tim Bray

Tags: rest, tim-bray, uris, urls