Our whole system is being designed around REST and are now considering how processes which are quite clearly RPC in intent can be mapped to RESTful resources without using verbs in the URL. Our remote procedure call is used to rebuild our search index when a content listing has been modified elsewhere. What we are thinking about doing i...
Hi Guys, I am new to the REST architecural design, however I think I have the basics of it covered. I have a problem with returning objects from a RESTful call. If I make a request such as http://localhost/{type A}/{id} I will return an instance of A from the database with the specified id. My question is what happens when A contains ...
Are there any known howtos or best practices for web service REST API versioning? I have noticed that AWS does versioning by the URL of the endpoint. Is this the best way? ...
This is one of those little detail (and possibly religious) questions. Let's assume we're constructing a REST architecture, and for definiteness lets assume the service needs three parameters, x, y, and z. Reading the various works about REST, it would seem that this should be expressed as a URI like http://myservice.example.com/...
Is there a way to setup authentication (ala "Basic Authentication") without actually setting up an SSL Certificate? I'd also like to do this in REST or regular SOAP WCF Services, preferably in REST, but would like to be able to mix the services. In other words, "I want to be able to send a regular old username and password just like in...
I come from a Java background and with any servlets-based technology, it's trivial to map a range of URLs (eg /reports/, /secure/.do) to a specified servlet. Now I'm less familiar with PHP but I haven't yet seen anything that does quite the same thing with PHP (or mod_php). It's entirely possible that I'm missing something simple. How...
My design exposes two kinds of resources: Images Tags I would like clients to be able to request random images by their tag(s). For example: Give me random images that are tagged with "New York" and "Winter". What would a RESTful design look like in this case? ...
This is related to this question. I'm writing a Flex app (a WindowedApplication) that uses REST. Everything's fine when I post with valid authentication, but if I happen to pass an invalid username or password to the REST API (a Twitter REST API, to be specific), an authentication dialog pops up. That's not a desirable user experience, ...
My REST API returns JSON. I'm currently returning text/plain as the MIME type but it feels funny. Should I be returning application/x-javascript or some other types ? Second question is with regard to the HTTP status code for error conditions. If my REST API is returning an error state, I am returning as JSON { result: "fail", errorc...
Happy New Year. I have a bunch of SOAP Web Services. They all have an HTTP POST and GET interfaces along with the SOAP interface. I believe POST and GET are offered by default when building SOAP Web Services in .NET/Visual Studio. These methods either: (1) get information, e.g., provide your username, password and a transaction ID -> g...
How would you model a turn-based game server as a RESTful API? For example, a chess server, where you could play a game of chess against another client of the same API. You would need some way of requesting and negotiating a game with the other client, and some way of playing the individual moves of the game. Is this a good candidate fo...
If there is a REST resource that I want to monitor for changes or modifications from other clients, what is the best (and most RESTful) way of doing so? One idea I've had for doing so is by providing specific resources that will keep the connection open rather than returning immediately if the resource does not (yet) exist. For example,...
I never touch routes.rb beyond calling map.root to set a default route. I've always been content to use URLs of the form... /controller/action/perhaps_an_id and it works fine. Does this make me a bad person? Am I missing out on something totally awesome? What if I try to adopt RESTful design? Would that mean I have to edit routes.rb...
Last couple of days we were discussing at another question the best to manage randomness in a RESTful way; today I went to play a little bit with some ideas in Django only to find that there is no easy standard way of returning a 303 response (nor a 300 one, btw), that is, there doesn't seem to exist an HttpResponseSeeOther inside django...
I use cvs to maintain all my python snippets, notes, c, c++ code. As the hosting provider provides a public web- server also, I was thinking that I should convert the cvs automatically to a programming snippets website. cvsweb is not what I mean. doxygen is for a complete project and to browse the self-referencing codes online.I think...
At my company we're starting to branch into web APIs to access and update our data; initially for partners but then likely to the public in future. At the moment the way the API will look (e.g. SOAP, REST, RPC) is completely open and we haven't made any decisions yet, so I'm interested in both examples of web APIs people think are good, ...
I would like to use create a rails route for a user's open id. The url would look something like http://mysite.com/identity/:html_encoded_openid or http://mysite.com/identity/:html_encoded_openid.xml This would be so that the site could be queried for an open id and either view info for that identity or receive an xml document contai...
I am working on a small client server program to collect orders. I want to do this in a "REST(ful) way". What I want to do is: Collect all orderlines (product and quantity) and send the complete order to the server At the moment I see two options to do this: Send each orderline to the server: POST qty and product_id I actually don...
Dear lazyweb, In your opinion what are examples of good REST API implementation when evaluated based on consistency with the REST philosophy compliance with web standards just plain good software engineering In a previous question, some names were thrown about, namely Amazon S3 & flickr. ...
i want to display whatever the response of flickr.test.echo was on the page using rest (jquery ajax - because thats what im using) i need to supply an api_key The REST Endpoint URL is http://api.flickr.com/services/rest/ To request the flickr.test.echo service, invoke like this: http://api.flickr.com/services/rest/?method=flickr.te...