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Monday, January 12, 2009
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6 comments:
Rails has been really pushing this model since 2.0. It has a map.resource routing method that wires the rest CRUD to controller actions and even generates view helpers for restful links. And the make_resourceful plug-in can wire it to a DB model in just a few lines. Doesn't cover the category query though (yet).
I was thinking about this some more and question the use of '/items/-/{owner}joe@example.com' vs '/items?owner=joe@example.com'.
The GData category thing I can kind of understand, but why create a new (longer) syntax for what already exists?
@Mat: It doesn't surprise me that there are frameworks that set up the boilerplate for this. If all your resources have Atom representations and support the same HTTP methods, there's going to be a lot of common code. Thanks for the links.
Regarding the query syntax, the GData spec does support the category query via query parameters; see the protocol reference for a little more discussion. In my mind, putting it in the URL signifies this as a different resource (Joe's items, rather than all items). But this is really just a matter of taste I think. The only thing I can think of is that some web caches do not cache requests with query parameters (this is Squid's default behavior, for example) so there might be some practical cachability impact.
I am a newbie in this field and thanks for sharing such an informative blog here i never knew that if we design a RESTful web site it is also a RESTful web API.now i can easily use and implement it in this way
Why did you chose a query parameter (format) for specifying the desired representation instead of using HTTPs built in functionality of content negotiation through the Accept and Content-Type headers?
Otherwise, I really like the idea of RESTful websites and thought about it a lot before stumbling over your post. Great primer!
@Florian: If you read some of the discussions from the IETF HTTP Working Group, you'll find that there are many folks that think content negotiation was a bad idea in retrospect. Certainly it makes getting caching harder; your intervening caches must handle content variants correctly, and even then you have to make sure the server sets the Vary header properly. Using a query parameter instead is much more unambiguous.
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