Chapter 6. Performance
In order to deploy a RESTful web service in a commercial environment, a number of criteria must be met. One of these criteria is performance. Besides yielding the correct result, RESTful endpoints must do so in a timely manner. This chapter discusses how these concerns can be addressed in real world web services. Performance optimization techniques can be applied to different aspects of a web application. However, in this chapter, we will focus on the RESTful (web) layer. Chapter 10, Scaling a RESTful Web Service, explores techniques that apply to other aspects of web applications. The following topics will be covered in the next few pages:
- Using HTTP compression
- Using HTTP Cache-Control directives
- Using HTTP ETag headers
- Using HTTP
Last-Modified
/If-Modified-Since
headers
To illustrates these techniques, we will build the room availability component of our sample property management system web service