Comments on: Who GETs REST?

By: cbmeeks

cbmeeks — Mon, 13 Aug 2007 17:20:12 +0000

Strike what I said back in May.

I’ve spent the last couple of months getting a much better understanding of REST.

And delicious uses a REST-RPC hybrid anyway. :-)
http://www.signaldev.com

By: cbmeeks

cbmeeks — Fri, 25 May 2007 14:14:30 +0000

I still don’t understand why verbs in URLs are bad. delicious does it and they seem pretty successful?

I plan on releasing (yet another) image hosting site. eBlarg!

I hope to structure my URLS like:

View all pictures in “Florida” gallery with “Swimming” and “Diving” tag:
http://cbmeeks.eblarg.com/pictures/gallery/florida/swimming/diving

“pictures” would be the class, “gallery” would be the function and the tags would follow.

I think this follows the “no verbs” method but I plan on doing this for tags:

Edit tag:
http://cbmeeks.eblarg.com/tags/edit/florida

IMHO, the end user (who cares less about REST) can easily remember that URL and it makes sense to THEM.

Anyway, just my opinion.

By: zndyhhcemz

zndyhhcemz — Thu, 15 Feb 2007 18:03:33 +0000

unutaopba

By: Mazr

Mazr — Mon, 16 Oct 2006 21:46:11 +0000

IMO, it would be even better if you could somehow eliminate the query string to get something like:

http://www.example.org/users/surname/Michaels
http://www.example.org/articles/term/PHP

This would make the search URIs more inline with tag URIs:

http://www.example.org/articles/tag/PHP

Of course, browsers don’t normally generate URIs like this from forms so you’d need a JS or server rewrite/redirect to get URIs like these.

By: Magic8Ball

Magic8Ball — Mon, 09 Oct 2006 09:58:41 +0000

I’m looking for an XML description of a REST service, something like WSDL is there such a thing ?

By: SitePoint Blogs » MVC and web apps: oil and water

SitePoint Blogs » MVC and web apps: oil and water — Thu, 22 Dec 2005 11:38:30 +0000

[…] To me a direct consequence of promoting actions as first class objects is we end up with people putting verbs in URLs like “http://example.com/item/1/delete”, which in turn leads problems like this and implies tight coupling (between client and server) and RPC. GET is clearly labelled as “safe / read only” while putting a verb in a URL implies something is going to be done (which may or may not be safe); In particular, the convention has been established that the GET and HEAD methods SHOULD NOT have the significance of taking an action other than retrieval. These methods ought to be considered “safe”. This allows user agents to represent other methods, such as POST, PUT and DELETE, in a special way, so that the user is made aware of the fact that a possibly unsafe action is being requested. […]

By: HarryF

HarryF — Tue, 22 Nov 2005 22:43:04 +0000

Like you said, few people get the point, myself included. SOAP does well enough for my needs, but then I’ve never looked into REST to figure it all out for myself.

That’s a fair point of view. Think the two obvious benefits of REST over SOAP for system-to-system data exchange are REST makes it easier to use the network efficiently - e.g. you can use HTTP cache headers and having very general methods like GET and POST discourages fine grained APIs (which don’t translate well to networks) plus you will probably be able to inspect a REST service with a browser.

But was thinking more of CRUD-style frameworks and normal HTML interfaces.

an “action” parameter? It is basically your verb after all. http://www.example.com/?action=search or translated as http://www.example.com/?verb=search.

What about this URL http://www.example.com/results?term=PHP ?

Kind of evading the question there suffice to say another consequence is seperating “tools” for working with “resources” from the resources themselves. That might mean to edit a blog entry you might have a URL like http://www.example.com/backend/editor which displays the form you need and POSTs to the resource (URL) to update it.

I’m also assuming that the above only applies to GET requests and not POST?

Guess the encoded POST data might contain verbs but not the URL you POST to.

By: mrsmiley

mrsmiley — Tue, 22 Nov 2005 22:04:07 +0000

Like you said, few people get the point, myself included. SOAP does well enough for my needs, but then I’ve never looked into REST to figure it all out for myself.

I’m not sure what the basis is for removing verbs from the urls though. Would you include frameworks that typically accept something akin to an “action” parameter? It is basically your verb after all. http://www.example.com/?action=search or translated as http://www.example.com/?verb=search. You’d be hard pressed to find a way to translate said url without using any verbs in the urls considering it doesn’t contain any other parameters you could refactor.

I’m also assuming that the above only applies to GET requests and not POST?