Early days with REST

For last 7 years I have been following Roy Fielding's master piece, REST. I remember it was Rick Cobb who introduced this style of modelling services. Further Rajesh's musings helped me a lot in unleashing this style better. These days were very early days when REST trend has just started in industry. With no standards for styling, every other person has its own flavor of REST the way they want. If I remember the right names Restlet, RestEasy were some framework which emerged and they too had their beta version out.

We started writing REST services in a scripting language called TCL which was played on AOLServer. As such there was no support for REST but the choice was driven by application hosting platform. I remember those long discussion which I had with Rajesh understanding how to design URLs and responses. What resources are and how HTTP method maps to it and what it means then. I too remember the discussion on data interchange styles; XML was already popular, JSON was blooming, UL LI, XOXO :) etc. Deep diving microformat was our part time hobby.

Rick later introduced concept of POD (point of  something), with concept of PODs I realized the actual benefits of REST; importance of statelessness and how can that solve the Scalability & Availability needs of the service.