Re:When REST isn't Good Enough
by jon_moore on Tuesday November 27, 2012 @10:05PM
(#4840799)
I'm pretty sure Google's home page doesn't include every possible search term for you to select from, and that's a perfectly RESTful example of an exposed function (search). Forms are a very powerful hypermedia construct.
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In the context of a website, maybe you can have a helper like that to avoid the REST bloat. But the architecture is for arbitrary APIs, existing outside of web pages, in which I don't have a neatly visible form. All I'm allowed to do is give the user URIs to choose from.
Some kinds of apps (esp those that can't tolerate the overhead of REST, like for mobile) need to know how to format a Google search request without navigating through a session on Google site, but just knowing what it should look like, and formatting it that way. REST would restrict you to pointing them to google.com and following links; it prohibits you from saying, "hey, you can have your app just point to google.com, then '?q=', then your search terms connected by +'s".