REST (REpresentation State Transfer), in the words of Wikipedia, is is a style of software architecture for distributed hypermedia systems. Perhaps the most well known example of REST is the World Wide Web. The concept of REST was first introduced in Roy Fielding's dissertation Architectural Styles and the Design of Network-based Software Architectures. Roy is one of the principal authors of the HTTP Specification. In the world of REST, URLs represent resources and clients interact via HTTP methods (GET, DELETE, POST, PUT). Support for REST was added to WCF in .NET Framework 3.5. A great starting point for reading up on REST is REST for the Rest of Us.

I recently started work on an open source attribute-based REST API for creating RESTful .NET services. I've cleverly code named it RyanOlshan.REST until I can come up with a cool name for it. In a series of blog posts to come, I will blog about building an attribute-based REST API on the .NET Framework, with topics ranging from:

• Attribute basics
• Reflection basics
• URI templating with System.UriTemplate and System.UriTemplateTable
• HTTP method basics
• Serialization basics
• HTTP Handler basics

REST Books

RESTful Web Services

RESTful .NET (October 2008)