Fabio Mancinelli wrote: > Sergiu Dumitriu wrote: > >>> I don't like it since I'm not sure this is very RESTful. >> +1, but it depends. >> >> A resource is identified by the path, without query parameters. >> > Not sure about this... At the protocol level, > AFAIK, query parameters are part of the URI an though they contribute to > identify the resource. > > So, at this level, imho, it is almost a philosophical or best practice > matter.
Yes, it is. But the whole REST concept is a best practice on top of something old. After all, it's just a way of using classic HTTP in a special way. There are no hard validation rules yet, and the fact that something is or isn't REST depends on the person you ask. And if you ask me, the path is the identifier of the resource, while query parameters and HTTP headers only influence the representation. So, is the version/language a different representation of the same resource (the document), or a whole different resource? This is also a philosophical question, and we might have different opinions on this one, too. And the answer depends on the involved content, too. About the long URLs, many coding books suggest that longer, descriptive names are better than very short ones. A name should be long enough to describe what it holds, but from all the possibilities, the shorter ones are preferable. Short, _understandable_ names. A URL is a name, too. We should favor understandability over shortness. > Anyway I thought again about query parameters and actually the main > reason why they are problematic is because apparently many caching > agents, by default, don't take into account query parameters. Squid, for > example, does so (but it can cache resources by using the full URI > http://foo/bar?param=value if configured properly). > > So if we want to be sure that caching occurs, maybe it's best to > identify cacheable resources without using query parameters. > > -Fabio -- Sergiu Dumitriu http://purl.org/net/sergiu/ _______________________________________________ devs mailing list [email protected] http://lists.xwiki.org/mailman/listinfo/devs
