Recently, a lot of companies have been moving towards RESTful web services. REST has a lot of benefits compared to SOAP, XML RPC in terms of performance and ease of development. You can read more about these here:
- http://tomayko.com/writings/rest-to-my-wife
- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YCcAE2SCQ6k&list=LL2z2wupyC90h_FpIoe9jmnw
- http://www.slideshare.net/cebartling/rest-web-services
In development while testing RESTful Web Services, I have found the following tools helpful:
- curl - Comes in the Cygwin distribution for windows. You can find linux installables for your flavor of linux here. Sample uses of curl to make REST calls:
- curl -v http://flickr.com/rogermenezes/photos/61 -H 'Content-Type:application/json' -H 'X-FlickrAPI-Version:1.0' -X DELETE
- curl -v http://flickr.com/rogermenezes/albums -H 'Content-Type:application/json' -H 'X- FlickrAPI -Version:1.0' -X POST -d '{"name": "hawaii 2011", "tags": "vacation, hawaii, ", "creation_date": "2012-02-22T13:42Z"}'
- Chrome Plugin - Advance REST Client
- You can install this plugin through the Chrome Web Store. You can save past requests and the plugin also maintains a history of previous calls you had made.
- Fiddler2 [I'll add another introductory post in the future for Fiddler.]
- Fiddler2 snoops your network traffic. As soon as you start Fiddler, it creates a proxy through which all of your traffic gets routed. It provides a great interface for digging thought the network traffic. It also provides a way to "reissue and edit" past requests. Here, you can edit your past REST requests and execute them repeatedly.
