In this chapter, we covered the important topics of RESTful web service application development and security, albeit from a higher point of view than we have done in previous chapters. Because these topics require highly specialized knowledge, we only covered enough of them to be able to make pragmatic decisions during development. In all likelihood, the supporting environments for our web services will be managed by third party vendors or internal IT departments. Nonetheless, as well rounded developers, we should understand what it takes to engineer secure, scalable, and highly available web applications.

In the next chapter, we will discuss various solutions for describing, producing, consuming, and visualizing RESTful web services.