RESTful Web APIs

Progressive Disclosure is a concept in User Interface Design which advocates only presenting to the user the information they need when they need it. In many ways, the book you are reading right now is an example of this principle. In fact, it is quite likely that this book wouldn’t have “worked” a mere seven years ago. For you see, the programming world was quite a different place when RESTful Web Services, the predecessor of this book, was written. At that time, the term “REST” was was rarely used. And when it was used it was often misapplied, and widely misunderstood. This was the case despite the fact that the standards upon which REST is based, namely HTTP and HTML, were developed and became IETF and W3C standards in roughly their current form in the second half of the 1990s. Roy Fielding’s thesis paper in which he introduced the term REST and on which this book was based was itself published in 2000.