REST

I am preparing a lecture about Cloud Computing and I came across an interesting video about the Google APIs architecture, it is almost one year old - Google IO 10, but worth to see. The video is describing the advantages and also the problems of REST. Google suggests the partial data operations and multiple read write formats. Next section is describing how REST gets awkward; when you need for example to rotate a picture in Picasa server. You need to request the data, process the data and send it back, resulting in two transfers. The traffic can be reduced by augmenting REST with custom verbs. Google will support in parallel the REST and JSON RPC styles in parallel giving the designer the choice. The video is also describing Google approach to make the APIs libraries up to date using dynamic discovery. A sample coding session is presented at the end. Very interesting stuff inspiring to many discussions, check it out.