A RESTful web service testbed

It's time to build a more complete RESTful service example. In this web service, we'll aim to perform all the common activities of a real service. This is often referred to by the acronym CRUD, which stands for Create, Read, Update, and Delete for all of the common operations associated with persistent data. Since we're dealing with a RESTful web service, we'll also throw in multiple representations for a resource, and connectedness to make it easy for clients to navigate through the service resources.

So, what should our service do? My friend and colleague, Mark Volkmann, introduced the eample of a database of music information. In this example, the service service contains information about several kinds of resources:

• Music artists (Artists)
• Albums
• Songs

This is a nice example because it is rich enough to expose many of the problems that need to be solved by RESTful web service without becoming so large that it's unwieldy to explore. The domain model is immediately familiar, so we can focus on the technologies and not the model.

With this service we can explore not only traditional browser-based HTML, but XML and even an Ajax client using JSON. We can also use it as testbed for things like caching, security, clustering/failover, and composition of services.