Several of these points are highly prescriptive without offering any motivation for the advice. For example, "your public API should not depend on the structure of your URIs. Instead there would typically be a single XML file that points to the components of your service." It's difficult to understand this kind of point without an example in hand - preferably an example taken from an actual website. The whole list pr…
I agree. A lot of the more pedantic REST advocates seem to use this kind of thinking, such as implying that we shouldn't use descriptive URIs because the client or programmer shouldn't need to understand how the URIs are structured. If that's the case, surely we could break REST convention as much as we want and just make the programmer or client go along with it. I think when most normal people say REST, they simply…
Re: Common REST Mistakes
#41tlack,
when you write 'A lot of the more pedantic REST advocates' you make it seem as if there was a choice to be 'strict REST' or 'less pedantic REST'. The problem with that is as follows: REST is an architectural style, which means that it consists of a set of constraints it imposes on an architecture. The benefit is that such constraints induce a set of system properties (e.g. cacheability, scalability). Usually, the choice for an architecture means that you are interested in your system having these properties.
Now, if you drop constraints at will, you modify the style and do not get the desired system properties.
The notion of 'non pedantic REST' (or 'Low REST') is missing the point.