Roy Fielding’s REST-style architecture is brilliantly simple and adaptable, but it can be difficult finding comprehensive information on how to apply its concepts or get help from the development community. There are many great resources for developers or even those with some basic web development skills to learn and apply REST APIs to their front-end web projects. Here are just a few really great places to go for information beyond the REST page on Wikipedia.

REST Primers, Tutorials and Examples

  • How I Explained REST to My Wife – Ryan Tomako’s great plain-speak story of REST is the stuff of legends. Someone needs to turn it into an Xtranormal movie.
  • Architectural Styles and the Design of Network-based Software Architectures – The complete dissertation by Dr. Fielding published in 2000 for UC Irvine. Think of it as the opposite of explaining it to your wife
  • Learn REST – A deep online training session by Dr. M. Elkstein that takes you into making REST calls from a variety of languages including Java, Javascript, Perl, PHP, Python and Ruby. It also can be used to design wrappers around a variety of REST APIs in your language of choice.
  • How to Build a REST app in .NET – MSDN offers information on using the Windows Communication Foundation to call REST APIs.

REST Development and Testing Tools

  • RESTClient – A Mozilla Firefox extension that replicates calls made via REST and displays responses right from the browser.
  • jQuery JSON-REST plugin – A plugin to jQuery that enables simplified calls through Javascript. Also of note is the reference for .ajax() calls.
  • cURL – A binding for PHP to simplify making REST/HTTP calls.

REST References and Discussions

  • This Week in REST – A weekly roundup of news about REST maintained by Ivan Zuzak. He includes blog posts on a variety of subjects.
  • RESTwiki – A compendium of resources that are all about REST. This isn’t a very active reference, but it’s pretty comprehensive.
  • Programmableweb API Directory – Lists APIs from a variety of services to help build Mashups by pulling in data from services like Facebook, Twitter, and GoogleMaps

*Bonus* LongJump Platform as a Service REST Resources

  • REST API Reference – We have exposed almost all of our internal functionality with accessibility through our web service. It’s like having a complete backend enterprise environment accessible via REST calls.
  • REST API Cheat Sheet – If you’re an old-hand at making REST calls, this quick reference gives you what you need fast.