RESTing easy with Grails
Tools in Action Abstract
Representational state transfer (REST) is a way of thinking, not a protocol or standard-- it's a style of designing loosely coupled applications that rely on named resources (in the form of URLs, URIs and URNs, for instance) rather than messages. Ingeniously, REST piggybacks on the already validated and successful infrastructure of the Web-- HTTP. That is, REST leverages aspects of the HTTP protocol such as GET and POST requests, which map quite nicely to standard business-application needs such as create read, update, and delete (CRUD). By associating requests, which act like verbs, with resources, which act like nouns, you end up with a logical expression of behavior — GET this document and DELETE that record, for example.
To quote Leonardo da Vinci, "simplicity is the ultimate sophistication." REST embodies this thought and thus yields highly scalable, loosely coupled systems that, as it turns out, are simple to build. There are a few mechanisms for implementing RESTful applications-- Restlets and JSR 311 are two in a handful of opitons; however, they address one aspect of RESTful applications and ignore other aspects like an ORM and testing. Groovy's Grails gives you the ability to apply RESTful techniques with a full fleged web application framework that supports an ORM and testing to boot! As you see, using Groovy's Grails framework makes building RESTful Web services a snap.
Speaker
Andrew Glover is a developer who writes for multiple online publications including IBM's DeveloperWorks, Oreilly's ONJava and ONLamp portals, Dev2Dev, and InfoQ; additionally, he is the co-author of Java Testing Patterns (Wiley, 2004), Groovy in Action (Manning, 2007), and Continuous Integration: Improving Software Quality and Reducing Risk (Addison-Wesley, June 2007). He is a frequent speaker at various conferences around the country as well as a speaker for the No Fluff Just Stuff Software Symposium group. You can keep up with him at thediscoblog.com.
