Why Should You Care about REST?

MSDN Magazine January 2009 edition published first article in Service Station column about building WCF services using REST.

Article is titled An Introduction To RESTful Services With WCF by Jon Flanders.

In this article Jon mentioned about “Why Should You Care about REST?” as

“In my mind, there are two main reasons. First, REST offers some significant features and benefits over RPC technologies in many cases. Second, Microsoft is moving many of its own implementations away from RPC technologies (such as SOAP) and toward REST. This means that even if you aren't convinced or motivated to use REST to build your own systems, as more frameworks and technologies from Microsoft (and others) move to REST, you'll need to know how to interact with them.”

With that it is quite obvious that Microsoft/WCF is moving towards REST in year 2009.

In this post I would like to collect some of the good links to start on REST.

1. HTTP - Hypertext Transfer Protocol – To get overview of HTTP
2. Dissertation of Roy Thomas Fielding – To understand REST architecture
3. A Guide to Designing and Building RESTful Web Services with WCF 3.5
4. Fiddler – Tool to capture http traffic