Darrel

I use HATEOAS because I derive very specific benefits from the client/server decoupling it enables. I have used it to build a large business application. I agree that far too many people talk about HATEOAS that have never really used it on real projects and that is unfortunate. However, I suggest you avoid throwing out the concept because the messengers are inadequ

Not sure how all REST folk feel, but Roy doesn't have any problem with using the convention of file extensions to indicate resources with different formats. http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/rest-discuss/message/1396...

As soon as you decide to create two URLs such as /user/1.json and /usr/1.html you are creating two distinct resources. The litmus test for determining if two URLs refer to the same resource is you do a GET on both and only one of them returns a 200 the other returns a 303 with the Location header set to the URL that returned a 200.

A REST API should be simple to use. However, it is frequently not easy to build a simple REST API.

All query string parameters are used to identify the resource also. RFC 3986 states "The query component contains non-hierarchical data that, along with data in the path component (Section 3.3), serves to identify a resource within the scope of the URI's scheme and naming authority (if any)."

There is absolutely no difference between path segments and query parameters from the perspective of resource identification.