reading-notes

REST

Explaining REST

How I explained REST to my brother

1. Roy Fieldling helped write the first web servers
2. “Because they weren’t designed to be used like that. When Fielding and his colleagues started building the web, being able to talk to any machine anywhere in the world was a primary concern. But most of the techniques developers later used to get computers to talk to each other didn’t have those requirements. You just needed to talk to a small group of machines.”
3. “is all about applying verbs to nouns. For instance, when you go to a web page, the browser does an HTTP GET on the URL you typed in and back comes a web page.”
4. Get “gets things”. hard to describe an action with an action
5. POST adds something to other systems
6. likewise PUT replaces things in other systems or a “partial update”
7. PATCH is used to determine what the data model should look like.