bcoates left an excellent comment here that has been marked dead for no reason that I can see.
Designing Pragmatic RESTful APIs
11–20 of 21 posts
Re: Designing Pragmatic RESTful APIs
#12Insert standard comment about how this does not touch on HATEOS and is therefore not only not REST, but evil and perverse and all that is wrong with the world
Maybe we need a new name/acronym for this "pragmatic REST" style?
Re: Designing Pragmatic RESTful APIs
#13Developing REST API per definition of REST cannot be done pragmatically in the way described, so you are going to screw a lot of people if they think this is the last word on REST. 1. REST is a hypermedia API that (somewhat) describes its own services by returning URLs to resources, etc. Most people don't understand what REST was meant to be that can drive how REST clients were meant to be developed. Some of the majo…
Could you explain a bit more on the limitations of the search functionality and how you got around it? Would likely be very useful.
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Re: Designing Pragmatic RESTful APIs
#14Insert standard comment about how this does not touch on HATEOS and is therefore not only not REST, but evil and perverse and all that is wrong with the world
Maybe we need a new name/acronym for this "pragmatic REST" style?
REST level 1. Or 2.
http://martinfowler.com/articles/richardsonMaturityModel.htm...
I don't agree with people who say that only level 3 is "true REST", but there is a qualitative difference.
Re: Designing Pragmatic RESTful APIs
#15Totally agree @hakaaak, especially with the care that should be put into making the API navigable using hyperlinks. It's kind of cool to have a browser-friendly API to play with in the beginning, but it should be pure bonus. APIs are designed to allow a computer program to interact with another one. Favouring query strings over HTTP headers for anything other than altering the projection of a resource is non-sense. I…
>> I also don't seem to understand why we must reinvent the wheel and duplicate features when HTTP clearly mentions how to specify an output format, and how to handle partial responses (Range, Content-Range, 206 Partial Response, etc).
It's not just individual features such as pagination and format handling where the article fails to suggest using standard HTTP features. After the first few pages -which do a pretty good job of explaining the most basic aspects of REST APIs- the document more or less switches to a 'just put it in the querystring'-attitude for about everything that goes beyond basic CRUD operations. Want a subselection of resources based on attribute values? Put the attributes in the query string. Want to limit the returned fields? Put them in the querystring. Need to non-standard logic for handling the request? Signal it in the querystring, so the API user can 'see it'. Want to query something or get a calculated response that needs input parameters (i.e. JSON-RPC)? Put all parameters in the query string. Want to suppress error codes or otherwise instruct the server to change its behaviour? Querystring...
Personally I don't really like using the querystring for every bit of information you want to include in a request, because before you know it the amount of crap you can include in URLS will grow out of hand. I think dumping everything into the querystring pollutes the URI space of your API, which makes it harder to efficiently cache responses or limit access to certain API endpoints.
I'm working on a web application with a REST API at the moment, and I'm trying to avoid using the querystring as much as possible. For example query arguments can also be POST-ed to a query URI that returns a link temporary resource that identifies the query result. Format specification can (and should) be handled using the Accept/Content-Type headers. Pagination can be implemented using the range and partial response headers. Complex queries that are performed often and cannot easily be encoded in a POST body (or a query string) can get their own URI (e.g. '/dogs/by-age/0-1y', '/dogs/by-age/1-5y', etc).
Probably this approach has some serious downsides, but I'm still sticking with it for now. Maybe someone can make me change my mind with good arguments? ;-)
Re: Designing Pragmatic RESTful APIs
#16If I had to restart my API over again I would make it self-documentable. Browsing to /dogs with an Accept: text/html would include a description about that end-point with the possibly accepted parameters, and links to related resources. If authenticated it would also include the content of that actual route and maybe even a small JavaScript request builder.
I like the idea of self documentation but please don't do this with a text/html header. Oftentimes I want to see in the browser what the GET response is. Probably it's better to explicitly use a .html extension instead.
Re: Designing Pragmatic RESTful APIs
#17Insert standard comment about how this does not touch on HATEOS and is therefore not only not REST, but evil and perverse and all that is wrong with the world
> evil and perverse and all that is wrong with the world
That is never the implication of that standard comment.
Re: Designing Pragmatic RESTful APIs
#18Totally agree @hakaaak, especially with the care that should be put into making the API navigable using hyperlinks. It's kind of cool to have a browser-friendly API to play with in the beginning, but it should be pure bonus. APIs are designed to allow a computer program to interact with another one. Favouring query strings over HTTP headers for anything other than altering the projection of a resource is non-sense. I…
>> I also don't seem to understand why we must reinvent the wheel and duplicate features when HTTP clearly mentions how to specify an output format, and how to handle partial responses (Range, Content-Range, 206 Partial Response, etc). It's not just individual features such as pagination and format handling where the article fails to suggest using standard HTTP features. After the first few pages -which do a pretty g…
You're heading the right direction.
I'm one of the authors of http://greendizer.com/docs/api/, and https://github.com/mohamedattahri/Nuages
Take a look at them.
Re: Designing Pragmatic RESTful APIs
#19In the section "What about attribute names?" I think they get it wrong by saying that camel case would be better than snake case because it would make more sense in Javascript that way.
The issue I take with that is you can't assume your API consumer is using Javascript at all. Thus, making it camel case might look right in Javascript or many other languages, but weird in Ruby.
There are a lot of good ideas here, but I think the author messed up on that assumption. A huge portion of modern API usage is in Objective-C, Java, PHP, Ruby, C#. So, attribute naming could be valid as FooBar, fooBar, or foo_bar.
I think the right point would be to be consistent in attribute naming style. Pick one format and use that.
Designing your API to be consumed by one language is mostly foolish unless you are the only one using the API.
Re: Designing Pragmatic RESTful APIs
#20How does he talk about REST and totally forget about HATEOAS...