Ralph LeVan <[log in to unmask]> wrote: > Where at all possible, I want a true REST interface. I recognize that > sometimes you need to use POST to send data, but I've found it very helpful > to be able to craft URLs that can be shared that contain a complete request. That's not impossible with REST. There's a lot of confusion about what REST actually means, but the IBM article at https://www.ibm.com/developerworks/webservices/library/ws-restful/ isn't bad. A couple of good rules-of-thumb to keep in mind: 1. URIs name objects; they do not name actions. So if you've got requests like "GET /foo/getAuthors?doc=bar", you're doing it wrong. It should be something like "GET /foo/doc/bar?field=authors", or even better, "GET /foo/doc/bar/authors". Once you get this straight, the bit about not using GET to side-effect the server sort of falls out automatically. 2. Lots of proxies (mistakenly) don't forward bodies for GET requests. So as a practical matter, you can only pass parameters to a GET request as a "query string". POST requests don't have that drawback, so if you're passing parameters which can't be expressed as a short text string (image searches, for instance, with a query image), you'll wind up using POST even if GET is the "correct" method. Bill