Thank for having such an in-depth look at the issue, Dennis, but I could have saved you some time; you're making inferences about the intent of Amazon's software based on how the URIs look, and while you may very well be right, it doesn't matter because it's irrelevant to the architecture; GET returns the data whether there's query parameters, operation names, misuse of hierarchy, or whatever good or bad practice you might care to name.
There's one comment you made that I wanted to respond to though ... On 11/25/06, Dennis Sosnoski <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > The only RESTful part of the GET-based XML interface seems to > be that it *does* use "GET" rather than "POST" - but I can't see any > advantage provided by this, aside from making it easier for users to > generate requests as text strings (which is not one of the claimed > benefits of REST, AFAIK). There are many advantages depending upon what angle you're looking at it from - caching, security, reliability, etc.. In general though, I think the big one is that any HTTP client anywhere can turn that URI into data using GET. If POST were used, then clients would also have to know *what* to POST, removing that benefit. Coordination costs are less (effectively zero) using GET. Mark.
