What are some good resources for developing RESTful Web Service Schemas?

Question

So, I'm looking at building a brand new REST WS API for my application. I've done my homework on the technical side and feel fairly confident about setting up paths/to/resources.andTheirRepresentations. However, does any one have any suggestions on good resources for processes to develop what those paths should be? What methods should be out there, what should be its own resource, etc.?

I recognize that ultimately this is up to me as the developer ultimately but I'm looking for a little more solid methodology than "Jot-down whatever I can come up with for a while then eat my own dogfood until its perfect."

I guess this sort of API design methodology wouldn't be exclusive to REST but that just happens to be the context I'm dealign with now. :)

Answer 1

I think that a good starting point would be to consider it from the point of view of consumers of the service. I'd suggest a book on API design. Here's a starting point.

Answer 2

Happy to recommend RESTful Web Services by Leonard Richardson and Sam Ruby

Answer 3

Please read this article by the guy who created REST about some common misconceptions of REST APIs. In particular, you need to avoid defining URI conventions out-of-band as part of your API. nested/URIs/to/resources has nothing to do with REST, and even violates one of its constraints if you provide more than just an entry point URI as part of your API.