This talk is for developers dabbling in REST, but who aren’t yet invited to Roy Fielding’s thanksgiving dinner. It will go through the history of REST and how it relates to SOAP and RPC-style APIs before delving down into the concepts of hypertext and hypermedia, how to implement them in your API and last, but not least; Why!

If you’ve started exploring the world of REST and miss the comfort of safe typing and service discovery of SOAP and WSDL, this talk is for you. You will learn why this is missing in the world of REST, what alternatives exist and how your API can embrace them and become much more self-descriptive and user friendly than RPC-style APIs could ever dream of!