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
