Excellent summary, Stephen! Requiring a descriptor (in any format) to find a service URI often just moves the problem -- making the next question "what is the best URI to publish the descriptor?" Still, it's needful to describe REST APIs, and this often seems unreasonably hard to do. For me, anyway.
Someday I'd like to attack a Restlet-specific application descriptor mechanism that is both machine and human readable ... sort of an extended Javadoc for Restlet ... I think the Resource refactoring might be one key to doing this. Ideally the descriptor would work two ways -- you could export it from a Restlet server application, and then feed it to a code generator to make a Restlet client skeleton. We'd also need some way of interrogating the "plumbing" of an application -- what patterns reach what targets. Anyway, fun to think about. - Rob On Thu, Apr 2, 2009 at 2:26 PM, Stephen Groucutt <stephen.grouc...@gmail.com > wrote: > I guess this is a long way to say "I don't know", but I also think that in > a proper REST design, it probably doesn't much matter. :) In my opinion, > you can either codify the endpoints formally, as in a WADL, or you can > informally simply agree on your starting point URIs, code them into your > clients, and go from there. ------------------------------------------------------ http://restlet.tigris.org/ds/viewMessage.do?dsForumId=4447&dsMessageId=1522571
