Designing a Pragmatic RESTful API

Re:Designing a Pragmatic RESTful API by artsrc on Tuesday June 04, 2013 @08:18PM (#5822943)

I think what you have said is correct of how, but not why.

However I think what this whole discussing is missing is the properties that you derive by adhering to a REST design.

I think there should be some tests of a design to see if you are actually getting the benefits of REST.

For example in a REST design you can re-arrange the internal URL's in a server and the site is still usable to clients because they are following links from the root.

Why do we want this ability to rearrange URLs?

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Re:Designing a Pragmatic RESTful API by icebraining on Wednesday June 05, 2013 @02:58AM (#5824106)

The concept of putting URLs in the document is not just so that you can re-arrange them, it's so that you can use HATEOAS.

Example: think of posts here on HN. One thing a specific media format would include is a "reply" link, but on hellbanned posts that link would absent, so that state would be inaccessible to clients.

Or say you've used comments on your blog, so each post has a link to the list of comments about it. Now you switch to Disqus, and so you could change the URL to point to their comments pages instead, and a decent client would use it transparently (assuming good media types).

All of this is taken for granted and used a lot on the real RESTful space: the HTML Web.

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