This is a presentation I gave some years ago while I was working at INRIA. It’s about the REST architectural style and its constraints. I think that it could be useful as an introduction, and to understand how these principles are applied to today’s Web infrastructure.

Actually this presentation was part of a bigger plan about how to apply REST principles to pervasive computing.

The idea was very simple: connect real-world devices by using an infrastructure that exposes them as if they were web resources, and leverage the Web architecture (and its REST principles) to interact with the world surrounding us.

A paper with these ideas has been published in 2008 on the proceedings of the 1st International Workshop on Ad-hoc Ambient Computing, and also on a special issue of the International Journal of Ambient Computing and Intelligence (IJACI)

Unfortunately, I haven’t had the time to pursue and develop this research direction but I’ve found that a friend of a friend has actually had the same intuition and is developing it in a real project. His name is Andrea Reginato and his project is called Lelylan. Maybe you are interested in giving a look at it.