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Okay, so my name is Javier Ramirez, and my Twitter handle is super9, in case you want to ask anything during the talk or later. I'm one of the founders of Teowaki.
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Teowaki is a small startup where software developers can communicate with each other, share links, information, and documentation, among a few other things. On the technical side, Teowaki is a service built with Rails and is completely RESTful.
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But what is this REST thing? When I say something is RESTful or it utilizes REST, what does it mean? Why is it so important for Rails? The moment you start using Rails, you must begin thinking in terms of REST and all the associated concepts. That’s what I want to discuss with you today.
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Before we dive into REST, let me take you back to how the internet was about 20 years ago. Web pages were quite basic. If you visited Yahoo, Amazon, or Apple around that time, you would generally find just static information and maybe some banners—that was about it.
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However, around 15 years ago, things started to change. Suddenly, we had more interactive pages. You could integrate information from other services like weather updates or news content. The way developers accomplished this was through widgets, where external services provided JavaScript you would embed into your page.
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The downside was that if these widgets appeared terribly ugly, you often had no control over their design. Additionally, for developers, this approach was frustrating because integrating different services was cumbersome. Screen scraping became a popular resort to obtain data from various sites. Screen scraping involves downloading a web page, parsing the HTML to locate the desired data, and extracting it from a specified position in the structure of the page. This method was error-prone, as any changes to the web page structure could render your code useless.
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Fortunately, some developers recognized the need for APIs, allowing access to their services without resorting to screen scraping or using unattractive widgets. However, back in those days, many APIs were built using a protocol called SOAP, which while functional, was not user-friendly. The complexity of SOAP meant that crafting a simple request could quickly become a nightmare, often requiring intricate XML structures to perform even basic tasks.
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SOAP was so complicated that it required something called WSDL (Web Services Description Language) to define all possible service operations. Different services would differ dramatically in naming conventions for their operations, making cross-service integration particularly challenging. This often resulted in cryptic error messages if anything went awry, leaving developers frustrated with the experience.
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Despite these challenges, today we live in a different internet, with a plethora of apps and integrated services. Now it’s possible to assemble complex features with just a few lines of code. For instance, a mashup might involve pulling in images from Instagram and displaying them in a seamless infinite scroll on a web page. Whether it’s displaying geographical data or querying various services, today’s integration capabilities make it significantly easier to interact with various APIs compared to the past, and that is largely due to the advent of REST.
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REST stands for Representational State Transfer, and it's an architectural style for designing networked applications. Roy Fielding, one of the co-authors of the HTTP specification and the co-founder of the Apache web server, introduced REST in a doctoral dissertation in 2000. While the dissertation was complex and not easily digestible, it effectively encapsulated the foundational concepts of REST, which gained greater traction after David Heinemeier Hansson incorporated REST principles into Rails in 2006.
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When Rails adopted REST, it transformed the way developers thought about building applications. It allowed for a standardized method of building APIs, which had been absent until then. REST utilizes HTTP as its core protocol—meaning when you design applications and services, you should adopt HTTP as your foundation. Each request rests statelessly on the server, meaning that each request honestly stands alone without the server holding any context of earlier requests. As you build applications, understanding these principles becomes paramount.
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REST introduces a uniformity to the interface of web services, facilitating ease of understanding and predictability for developers. By knowing the basic HTTP methods, like GET, POST, DELETE, and PUT, developers can design applications that will function similarly, no matter the specific service. All they really need to know are the resource names specified in their API and which HTTP method to use in conjunction with them. This approach significantly simplifies working across diverse APIs.
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In Rails, defining routes and actions allows you to map these REST principles directly to how users interact with your application. For example, you can define resources easily within the routing file. When defining routes, Rails will generate the CRUD operations automatically tied to the corresponding URLs for resource management—this greatly simplifies the workflow for developers, allowing them to focus less on configuration and more on building features.
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RESTful design influences your controller setup as well. When scaffolding a new resource in Rails, you receive standard actions—index, create, edit, update, destroy—that are universally applicable across your application. This uniformity enhances the development experience, leading to a more robust and predictable application architecture.
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As for representations, Rails facilitates generating different formats for responses. Depending on the request from the client, you can easily vary the representation sent back—HTML, JSON, etc. This flexibility allows your application to serve diverse clients efficiently, whether they need a webpage or a JSON API response.
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Despite its advantages, REST is not solely limited to APIs, as it promotes a structured way of thinking for all web applications. In fact, adhering to RESTful principles in web applications fosters scalability and maintainability, allowing future developers to onboard quickly and understand your service’s architecture.
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While developing applications, it's important to understand some advanced REST concepts too, such as hypermedia. Hypermedia is crucial for enhancing navigability within your API, providing clients the links to related resources. Unlike traditional web pages, RESTful APIs can dynamically share these interconnections to streamline user interactions.
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By incorporating hypermedia elements into your API responses, users are empowered to navigate via links just as they do on a website. This can significantly lower the barrier to entry for new users of the API and create a seamless experience when accessing various functionalities. Ultimately, the flexibility REST provides—alongside its guiding principles—forms the backbone of a robust, efficient web application structure reliant on HTTP where resource management and accessibility are at the forefront. Thank you very much for your attention. I'm happy to answer any questions you might have.
