Restful Resources

This past week, I've come across a couple really useful resources for REST style architectural development that I can recommend:

The first is the O'Reilly book "Restful Web Services". I'm about halfway through and it has already illuminated some dark corners of Restful web service design, such as:

• When to use POST vs. PUT. (Use POST when the server is responsible for generating the URI of the associated resource; use PUT when the client is responsible for generating the URI).
• Authentication.

The authors make a point of distinguishing between REST in general and REST when applied to web service design, for which they describe a set of concrete best practices they call "Resource Oriented Architecture". This is very nice, and reminds me of Effective Java, which provides a set of best practices for Java software development.

The second REST resource I would like to recommend is the "Poster" plugin for FireFox. Poster enables you to make GET, PUT, POST, and DELETE http calls from within FireFox and see the results. It is a nice way to obtain a sanity check on what your web service is doing when you don't quite understand why your unit tests are failing.