Web APIs are becoming in a “de facto” operating system. By using these abstractions developers populate Internet with m2m services i.e. with new APIs. The main criteria of this process are mainly usability, fostering the service integration or creation mash-ups. However there exists some theoretical framework backing this phenomenon: Resource Oriented Architecture (ROA).
In this post I review one of the classical references about this topic, the book “RESTful Web Services” by L. Richardson & S. Ruby (O’Reilly 2007). Even though it could be considered an old reference and even the authors recognize that the ROA term could be controversial, for lots developers this books is the first step in the path of web programming. In this post, some basic concepts and principles will be presented, letting some design clues for the followings.