REST api ambiguity and WADL

Question

I have a REST api that's ambiguous, something like (this isn't the specific problem, just gives an idea of the ambiguity):

/toplevel/${customer_number}/some_command/more stuff /toplevel/${customer_number}/${some_product_name_anything_goes}/more stuff

We've been getting away with it because our .htaccess file lists the more specific 'command' form before the general ${product_name} version, and the first match wins. Now though, we're writing a WADL, and, as you might expect, we're having trouble with our chosen tool consuming the WADL, because the API is ambiguous. My questions are:

a) Does the WADL spec speak to whether they can validly represent ambiguous APIs?

b) Tool support - in your experience, do tools choke on ambiguous WADLs? (if ambi. WADLs are allowed then those are weak tools but, you'd want to be on the safe side)

c) Just any experience with ambiguous REST apis, most especially wrt WADLs, really.

For the curious, here's the latest spec:

As far as I can tell it doesn't specifically address this, I guess it really comes down to how tools handle it.

Thanks.

Answer 1

It is my experience that most people who are doing any serious amount of work in REST would prefer to use hypermedia for runtime discovery than using tooling and code gen against a metadata document.

It may be for this reason that you are not getting much input on your issue.