I just got the RESTful Web Services book (Leonard Richardson & Sam Ruby, O'Reilly, 2007) in the mail today.  I've only read the beginning, but so far it is great.  In fact, it brings me back to when I first started working with the "programmable web".  I got into the programmable web back when the web was only a few years old.  I spent years doing performance/scalability testing and tuning for large Web 1.0 applications and bizarre custom Web API's (think huge financial services rushing to get online).  Building tools to run realistic workloads through a system involves writing custom clients to simulate real user/browser interaction.  This is pretty ugly stuff when you are dealing with an application that was designed with only humans in mind (AKA all).  It involves lots of HTTP protocol level work.. screen scraping.. protocol sniffing and analyzing.. requests.. header mangling.. cookie handling.. redirects.. authentication.. session information parsing.. etc, etc.

Application simulation is pretty messy work.  There is no simple API to hide behind; you had to figure out what the API was for yourself.  See.. *every* web application has an API.  Though it might have been designed by accident.  This allowed me to see first hand how developers and frameworks butchered the use of the "Web" as a platform.  Staring at naked HTTP let me see every little bit of the hairball underneath.  Alas, any standardization around web services (or the concept to be officially named) was far off.

A friend (bearded Perl hacker) let me borrow a book to show me how Perl can do this cool web stuff:  Web Client Programming with Perl (Clinton Wong, O'Reilly, 1997).  This book helped me build my first web clients to do application simulation and testing.  There wasn't a ton of documentation at the time to do this sort of thing, so i relied heavily on this book.

So now.. 10 years later..  the Web has changed..  it has morphed into *the* distributed platform..  it is becoming organized.

As I flip through Restful Web Services, it all just looks right..  REST looks right..   It is simple..  it is HTTP..  it is all the guts I already know.  It almost feels like a sequel to my old favorite:

I have traded Perl for Python as my preferred scripting language the past few years, but I am still building simulators, web clients, and virtual users. I am excited to work on some new stuff in this area.