Feature

One of the most anticipated features in Drupal 8 is the integration of RESTful Web Services in Drupal core. Drupal devs are looking forward to being able to do things with core which they couldn't before, such as:

• Offering their site’s data up in an API for others to use and contribute to;
• Building better user interactions by adding and updating content in place instead of a full page submission;
• Developing iPhone and Android apps that can serve and manage content hosted in a Drupal site.

But what are RESTful Web Services? In this article, I will walk you through the different conceptions of what is RESTful and explain how the new modules in Drupal core address these different concepts.

A Quick History of REST

Many developers have become aware of REST due to the rising popularity of APIs. These APIs enable developers to build on top of services such as Twitter and Netflix, and many of these APIs call themselves RESTful. Yet these APIs often work in extremely different ways. This is because there are many definitions of what it means to be RESTful, some more orthodox and others more popular.
The term REST was coined by Roy Fielding, one of the people working on one of the earliest Web standards, HTTP. He coined the term as a description of the general architecture of the Web and systems like it. Since the time he laid out the constraints of a RESTful system in his thesis, some parts have caught hold in developer communities, while others have only found small – but vocal – communities of advocates.

For a good explanation of the different levels of RESTful-ness, see Martin Fowler’s explanation of the Richardson Maturity Model.

What is RESTful?

So what are the requirements for RESTfulness?