PUBLIC MARKS with tag rest

By following the REST style, I would have saved myself either A) having to alter my iOS code and resubmit to the store, or B) time spent researching alternate caching methods and implementing them in Rails. As it stands, my partially-RESTful API is going to cost me (and possibly the client) more time before we can call the project finished.

spire.io provides, as its foundation, a simple REST API. As such, the first thing you do is some discovery to get all the URLs you need to get started.

POST only becomes an issue when it is used in a situation for which some other method is ideally suited: e.g., retrieval of information that should be a representation of some resource (GET), complete replacement of a representation (PUT), or any of the other standardized methods that tell intermediaries something more valuable than “this may change something.”

Your APIs should do this. There should be a single endpoint for the resource, and all of the other actions you’d need to undertake should be able to be discovered by inspecting that resource.

One final approach that I find very interesting was mentioned by Jan Algermissen a while ago: If your format is based on an existing one, e.g. HTML or XML, your server can actually send the same content with different MIME types, depending on the client’s capabilities. A client that only included application/json in its Accept header would then get the content labeled application/json, while one that includes the specific MIME type application/vnd.whatever would get the same content with this label applied.

He made the mistake of directly coupling his application with the structure of the URIs and ended up breaking his system in the process.

REST URI relative to

Ces normes permettent aux utilisateurs des services RESTful de savoir toujours où ils mettent les pieds

Restkit is an HTTP resource kit for Python. It allows you to easily access to HTTP resource and build objects around it. It’s the base of couchdbkit a Python CouchDB framework.

A Web Friendly API?

Building Hypermedia APIs with HTML5 and Node shows how to build stable, flexible Web APIs using JavaScript on both client and server. Its practical examples demonstrate best practices for writing and maintaining Web APIs and provide clear coverage of general principles of hypermedia that appeal to Web architects.

Restkit is an HTTP resource kit for Python. It allows you to easily access to HTTP resource and build objects around it. It’s the base of couchdbkit a Python CouchDB framework.

When designing your hypermedia Web API, you don't always have to use a custom media-type to express your data and linking semantics. Instead you can use a well-known, registered media-type.

RESTful web services are one of our core design patterns. Fielding’s thesis identifies four major constraints that identify a RESTful architecture (statelessness, resource-orientation, uniform interface, hypermedia-driven application state). Many “RESTful” APIs only get 3 out of 4 of these; we’ve begun experimenting with using XHTML as a media type for our APIs, and this provides a lot of power in terms of scalability and loose coupling between client and server.

Update: Changed title and first paragraph to emphasize that the interface does not adhere strictly to the REST canon. See Oliver Charles’ detailed critique below.

HAL - Hypertext Application Language A lean hypermedia type for RESTful APIs

Pretty REST API docs authored in Markdown