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SE Radio 98: Stefan Tilkov on REST

Recording Venue: OOP 2008
Guest(s): Stefan Tilkov
Host(s): Markus
In this episode we discuss REST (Representational State Transfer) with Stefan Tilkov. We started out by discussing the 5 steps to REST: IDs, links, Standard Methods, multiple representations and stateless communication. We then looked at how to use HTTP for REST, and discussed about how to use it for Web Services. We then we discussed whether and how to use REST for enterprise applications, and not just for apps on the internet. We concluded the discussion with a couple of recommendations.


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17 comments
  • The MP3 for this episode appears only to be 5MB and cuts off part way through ??

  • I don’t get it. We had the same problem last time. The file on the server actually has 50+ MB. There’s something wrong with the delivery system. I am trying to fix it.

  • Hi,

    Podcast is only 5 minutes and 38 seconds in duration.

    Best Regards,

    Cliff Thompson

  • Great interview.

    I was hoping that the conversation would touch upon what I consider to be significant missing pieces in the REST-style approach. Namely, a uniform way of describing the resource id (URI) layout, and a uniform way of describing representations.

    You might spend hours agonizing over your URI design (per the discussion) but then have no way to publish that design in a machine-readable way. WADL is an attempt to step in here – but seems to have very little traction. Would have been interested in the guest’s take on this.

    Similarly when it comes to representation formats, “application/xml” doesn’t tell you very much. Applications currently provide an out-of-band doc page for what to expect the payload to look like, which seems less than ideal.

  • This episode is only 5MB and cuts off part way through ??

    Downloaded again today (following the comment – ‘Its Fixed) but it is *still* short and cuts off after 5mins or so ??

    Ah … the link of the home page points to a different file, the one on the episode specific page has the name …-fixed.mp3

  • RDF is a usable format here, either as raw RDF, or through techniques such as RDFa or GRDDL (both W3C technologies).

  • Great podcast and I would be very interested in more REST podcasts particularly if you could cover resource design.

    I’d also be interested in more SOA content, not necessarily WS* but more the style that people like Udi Dahan/Arnon Rotem-Gal-Oz discuss or the business centric approach taken by Steve Jones.

  • Great post from an expert and it will be a great knowledge to us and thank you very much for sharing this valuable information with us

  • While listening to this podcast I wondered at least twice: All this sounds like CRUD, but how do I match up the initials of PUT, GET, POST, DELETE with that acronym…? It now seems to me that this analogy goes some way to explain the popularity of REST as coming from the same roots as the ubiquity of the CRUD pattern in web (and other) applications.

    Another analogy I noticed is between the idea of multiple representations of a resource and that of provision of the (supposedly) same selection in different formats, which clipboard protocols use. For decades, this feature of clipboard has served as a source of phenomena that are inexplicable to the ordinary user. One root of this problem is that where there are multiple representations of the same resource, most of these representations will contain extraneous material that does not represent the resource. (“Layout crap” in HTML is one rather obvious example of this.) In order to establish and maintain its role in enabling interoperability, REST will have to maintain (and where necessary, develop) the clear distinction of the resource as such from representations.

    Best regards, Jan

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