News You Can Bruise for 2007 February 9

Permalink [Comments] (7) Fri Feb 09 2007 09:36:

I want to put an appendix in the REST book that lists a bunch of public RESTful web services. These are real services, or real products that create services when installed, and not models for services or service toolkits. So Rails and the Atom Publishing Protocol would not be on this list, but specific instances of the APP (like the Google Calendar web service) would, and a piece of weblog software that supported the APP would as well. Here are the ones I remember mentioning in the book:

Tell me about the others in comments.

Update: I know now about this list of APP services.

Comments:

Posted by James Snell at Fri Feb 09 2007 10:48

I'm not sure if these meet your criteria but the Lotus Connections and Lotus Quick products both expose Atom Publishing Protocol endpoints. Connections, for instance, allows blogs, activities, bookmarks and communities to all be managed via APP.

Posted by Leonard at Fri Feb 09 2007 10:53

Yeah, that's the stuff.

Posted by Scott Raymond at Fri Feb 09 2007 11:22

The new Stikkit API is good stuff, especially its use of standard media types like Atom, iCal, and vCard.

Posted by Duncan Cragg at Fri Feb 09 2007 17:07

Slightly old, but probably still valid, is a list I compiled here:

http://duncan-cragg.org/blog/post/2006-what-now-how-awards-rest-protocols/

The following three sites were the only ones I found doing reasonable REST back then, at least for read /and/ write operation, and apart from APP implementations:

- Open Streetmap- Numbler- LinkAGoGo

I'd like to use this opportunity to drop in a couple of pointers to anyone else watching this conversation (!):

(a) it's not just about PUT and DELETE - you can be a good REST citizen with just two-way state transfer in GET and POST - and your POST targets must be GETable or you've done it wrong!

(b) it /is/ about standardising content types to the highest possible level. Invoices that don't use Microformats should be given negative points...

Cheers!

Duncan

Posted by Duncan Cragg at Fri Feb 09 2007 17:15

Sorry - forgot a couple of things:

* I didn't list S3 'cos you already had it

* The eBay query API is a function-call API. If RESTful, it's only 'accidentally' so (see Mark Baker).

* (c) it /is/ also about content that includes links to more content - this is where 'accidental', function call APIs usually fall over (if they haven't already fallen over by barrelling ahead with a hand-crafted schema and ignorance of cacheing).

Cheers! Good luck with the last mile on the book!

Duncan

Posted by Nate at Sat Feb 10 2007 08:45

We offer our prediction markets service with an API at Inkling Inc: http://inklingmarkets.com

In fact, I loved what I saw of the restful stuff DHH was showing at the RailConf 2006, I went home and immediately moved us to bleeding edge Rails, and refactored a bunch of stuff so that the services we were about to offer were restful.

An example of a client using our API: http://casualobserver.net to recreate a prediction market just the way they want.

REST made things so easy. They were starting to integrate things minutes after reading the concise document we have on our API. So long are the days with other applications when I'd have to troubleshoot why some .Net client can't communicate with my Java Axis SOAP service. :) Thank god!

Posted by Nick Moffitt at Mon Feb 12 2007 13:49

It's an odd duck, to be sure, but surely coralcdn must qualify in its own bizarro way.

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