This book is focused on designing and developing Representational State Transfer (REST)
platforms in Rails. REST is the architectural style of the Web, consisting of a set of
constraints that, applied to components, connectors, and data elements, constitute the
wider distributed hypermedia system that we know today: the World Wide Web.
There are a few good reasons why it makes more sense to build platforms instead of just
products or applications. Platforms are like ecosystems interconnecting different
applications, services, users, developers, and partners. Platforms foster innovation through
the inputs of their direct collaborators. By providing application programming interfaces
(APIs) and software development kits (SDKs), platforms are more customer driven.
