by Sanchit Gera

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RESTful Services Part II : Constraints and Goals

In Part I of this series I wrote about HTTP and its constructs as they apply to web service design.

HTTP is only a small part of what goes into writing modern web services.

This post is about how you apply these constructs to create maintainable, robust services.

Defining REST

REST stands for REpresentational State Transfer. It’s an architectural style. This means that REST does not impose a formal standard to determine whether or not a web service is RESTful. Rather, it has a set of broad constraints, each with a specific goal in mind.

These constraints were first introduced by Roy Fielding, who was one of the co-authors of the HTTP specification back in 2000.

Fielding’s Constraints

Fielding created these constraints with the ultimate goal of making applications faster, more reliable, and easier to scale.

As a web service designer, your service should try to comply with these constraints as closely as possible in order to reap their benefits. So lets dive into them.

Constraint #1: Client-Server Architecture

The first constraint proposed by REST is the separation of the server from its client. You should encourage separation of concerns between your server and clients wherever possible. Your goal should be to maximize the division of labor — and minimize overlap — between the two.

The server, or back end, is typically responsible for storing your application’s persistent data, along with all the business logic required to interact with it. This could include user authentication, authorization, data validation, and so on.

The client, or front end, is responsible for making requests to the service, then doing something meaningful with the response that it receives.

The client itself may be a web service, in which case it simply consumes the data. Alternatively, it may be user-facing. An example of this would be a web or mobile app. Here, it is also responsible for both presenting the data to the user, and presenting an interface for the user to interact with it.

You should be able to treat each of these two components as a black box with respect to one another. This way, they can be modified independently. This encourages modularity within the application.

This concept is not unique to RESTFul applications, or even web applications. Most developers try to break up their projects into independent components anyway. But by stating this as an explicit constraint of RESTful design, Fielding further encourages this practice.

Lastly, reducing the number of things that the server is responsible reduces the amount of logic necessary. This in turn allows for better scalability and increased performance.

Constraint #2: Statelessness

The next important constraint proposed by REST is that of statelessness.

Broadly speaking, the main goal of a stateless service is to make incoming requests self-sufficient, and execute them in complete isolation.

Each request must have all the information that the server might need to properly process it and respond. In other words, the server does not need to use information from previous requests. The responsibility of maintaining the application state of a client is thus handed off to the client itself.

In order to understand this, consider a very simple web service responsible for responding to a user’s search queries. The exact representation of the entity being searched for is irrelevant. What’s important is that, instead of returning hundreds of search results in a single go, the server employs pagination: returning only 10 results at a time out of an arbitrarily large result set.

In a traditional “stateful” model of development, the server may be designed in such a way that it keeps track of all of its clients, along with all the pages they’ve already accessed.

And so, when a request comes in for a new page, the server’s able to look up the client in its system and determine the most recent page it received.

Then the server can proceed to respond with the next page, and update its system to reflect this. This goes on as the client continues navigating the result set.

In an alternate, stateless, approach, the responsibility for maintaining its state is decentralized and shifted onto the client. The client then must specify the actual page numbers of the result they want, as opposed to asking for the next page. For example:

GET http://my-awesome-web-service.com/pages/1GET http://my-awesome-web-service.com/pages/3

A stateless approach brings a couple of major advantages with it. First off, keeping track of client state becomes increasingly taxing on a server as the number of clients scales.

Secondly, and more importantly, a stateless service is also easily distributable. If a server is responsible for maintaining information about an application’s state, then it is also imperative that future requests are routed to the server that is storing this information.

If there are hundreds of servers responsible for processing incoming requests, then there must be some mechanism in place to ensure that requests from a specific client always end up at a specific server instance.

In the event that a server instance goes down, all information about a client’s state that was stored on that server goes down with it.

Of course, you could come up with an architecture where server instances can share data among among themselves. But this adds quite a bit of complexity.

A stateless service, by contrast, makes it much simpler to add and remove server instances on an ad-hoc basis. You can then further balance the load between them as needed.

Since the servers are agnostic to the incoming requests, scaling up is just a matter of adding more servers to the load balancer. Similarly, killing servers — intentionally or otherwise — does not impact a service’s reliability.

Of course, this simplicity comes at a cost. Having the client attach identical data with every request is a potential source of redundancy. Bandwidth isn’t free, so any additional information transferred adds some amount of overhead.

Constraint#3: Cache

The third constraint is that of explicit cacheability. The idea is to mark messages returned by a service as explicitly cacheable or non-cacheable. If they’re cacheable, the server should figure out the duration for which the response is valid.

If the client has access to a valid cached response for a given request, it avoids repeating the same request. Instead, it uses its cached copy. This helps alleviate some of the server’s work, and thus contributes to scalability and performance.

This is a form of optimistic replication — also known as lazy replication — where the service does not try to guarantee 100% consistency between itself and its clients unless absolutely critical. Instead, it makes this sacrifice in exchange for a gain in perceived performance.

For example, an API corresponding to a blogging platform may choose to make the list of blog posts cacheable for a couple of minutes if it knows that the frequency with which people try to access the posts far exceeds the frequency with which new posts are created. As a result, users may occasionally be presented with stale data, but the system as a whole performs better.

Of course, the cacheability of a resource and its duration are not universal, and require some consideration. If you chose incorrectly, this may frustrate your users.

Web services typically achieve cacheability using the standard Cache-Control header. Sometimes they do this in conjunction with others headers specified by HTTP.

The Cache-Control header effectively serves as a switch, determining whether a browser should cache the response in question.

Resources marked as private are cached only by the client, and are therefore limited to that one client only.

Resources marked public, on the other hand, may be cached by one or more intermediate proxies between the service and the client.

As a result, these resources may potentially be served to multiple users. Alternatively, one may pass in the argument no-cache and completely stop any caching of the resource.

Here’s what one of these Cache-Control headers looks like:

Cache-Control: public;max-age=3431901

The header also lets you specify the duration for which the resource is valid. This lets the client know when it should stop using its cached copy and request a new copy.

Here’s the logic behind this:

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Apart from this, HTTP also has mechanisms in place to perform what is known as a conditional request. The goal here is for the server to return certain resources to the client only when specific conditions are met.

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Assuming the client has a saved copy of a resource in its cache, it can make a request to the server to determine whether there is an updated copy of that same resource. If there is one, the server returns the new copy. Otherwise it tells the client to keep using its local copy.

This helps prevent redundant transfer of data over the network, while also making sure that the client has access to fresh data at all times.

There are a couple of ways HTTP lets you accomplish this:

Caching Approach #1: If-Modified-Since/Last-Modified

Along with every response that the server sends back, it may choose to attach a Last-Modified timestamp. This indicates when the resource was last changed.

When the client needs to request the resource again in the future, it makes the request to the server as it normally would, but with a relevant If-Modified-Since header. This tells the server to return the new copy of the resource, if one exists.

Otherwise, the server returns the status code 304, which instructs the client to keep using the copy it already has.

Caching Approach #2: If-None-Match/ETag

This scheme works similar to the previous one, except for the way resources are identified. Instead of using timestamps, the server sends back with each response a unique hash explaining the state of the resource at that point in time (known as the ETag).

For future requests, the client sends the relevant ETag to the server. If a resource exists with the same ETag, the server tells the client to keep using the cached copy. Otherwise the server sends a new one back to the client.

Caching is complicated. As your service begins to add more users, you’ll want to learn more about caching and how you can use it to your advantage.

Constraint #4: Uniform Interface

The Uniform Interface (or Uniform Contract) tells a RESTful service what to serve, in the form of a document, image, non-virtual object, etc.

REST does not however, dictate how you choose to interact with these resources, as long as they are consistent and well understood.

In general, before a client can interact with a RESTful service, it needs to agreed on:

  1. Identification: There must be a way to uniquely identify every resource that the service has to offer.
  2. Manipulation: There must be a standard set of operations that can be performed on any given resource with predictable outcomes. The outcomes of these operations must also be self descriptive and uniquely understood.

HTTP, for example, makes use of URLs for identification of resources. It also uses a handful of action verbs and well documented status codes to facilitate interaction with resource. (For a more in-depth detailed explanation of HTTP’s constructs, you can go back and read Part I of this series.)

Up until this point, we have considered RESTful services as being strictly tied to HTTP. With regards to web services, this is almost always accurate.

But in theory, REST can be implemented over any protocol that provides a decent way to achieve the two conditions I described above. For this reason, REST is sometimes also referred to as REST over HTTP to clarify that it’s being used over the web.

Constraint #5: A Layered System

A layered system builds on the client-server constraint we discussed earlier, and enforces an even more separation of concerns. The overall architecture of your service can be separated into individual layers, each serving a specific function.

More importantly, each layer must act independently, and interact only with the layers immediately adjacent to it. This forces requests to propagate in a predictable manner, without bypassing layers.

For example, in order to scale, you may make use of a proxy behaving like a load balancer. The sole purpose of the proxy would then be to forward incoming requests to the appropriate server instance.

The client, on the other hand, does not need to be aware of this division. It simply continues making requests to the same URL, unconcerned with the details of how the requests are being processed.

Similarly, there may be another layer in the architecture responsible for caching responses in order to minimize the work needed to be done by the server.

Another layer may behave like a gateway, and translate HTTP requests to other protocols.

One way you could use this would be to implement an FTP server. The client, would continue to make requests to what it perceives to be an HTTP server, while you actually have an FTP server doing the work under the hood.

Just like the client-server distinction, this layered system constraint minimizes the risk of coupling functionality in your service, but at the expense of additional overhead in the system.

Conclusion

To sum things up, we’ve looked at the important constraints that you should keep in mind when designing RESTful web services. I also want to stress that, though these are technically hard requirements that a service must fulfill in order to be considered RESTful, in practice this does not always happen.

Building real services is more about solving the problems at hand than meeting technical definitions. As a result, these constraints are most often used as guidelines by developers and architects, who then decide which rules to follow in their efforts to meet their own specific goals.

This is where the terms partially restful and fully restful come from. And in fact, most services you encounter online aren’t technically fully RESTful.

In the next, and final, part of this series I’ll discuss principles of HATEOAS, as well as the Richardson Maturity Model. This provides a slightly more quantitative approach to determining just how RESTful a web service really is. Find it here!

I hope this was a useful introduction to what goes into building a RESTful application. Understanding the principles of REST is sure to help you out when you’re working with a lot of third party APIs. Or even when you’re building your own applications on the web, mobile, or anywhere else.

As a bonus, I’ve also uploaded a presentation relevant to this topic here. The slide deck is borrowed from a short talk I delivered a couple of months ago at my university titled “The Impact of a RESTful Architecture on Application Performance and Scalability.” I hope you find it useful :)

Let me know in the comments if you have any feedback or feel free to reach out to me through my LinkedIn.

Here are some resources for further reading on REST:

Key Principles of Software Architecture — MSDN

Rest Explained, a presentation

Restful Web Services — Sam Ruby

WhatIsRest.com

Rest In Practice