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