--- In [email protected], Dennis Sosnoski <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > Anne Thomas Manes wrote: > > ... > > Let's say for example you have a service that manages information > > about people. A service-specific interface would expose interfaces > > like: > > > > person getPersonByName("anne") > > > > person[] getPeopleByAge("29") > > > > and a service-specific POX representation of these methods would be > > something like: > > > > GET http://example.org/getPersonByName?name=anne > > GET http://example.org/getPeopleByAge?age=29 > > > > A RESTful interface would be more like this: > > > > GET http://example.org/people/anne > > GET http://example.org/people?age=29 > > > > Note that to truly exploit the power of REST (and in particular, the > > "hypermedia as the engine of state" constraint), the response to the > > query by age should return a list of URIs for the people matching the > > query (each person is a resource with its own URI). > > > > Does everyone agree on this last point? It seems like that's going to > make for a lot of separate requests in order to get actual information > (since the GET http://example.org/people?age=29 result is a list of URIs). > > From the performance standpoint, it's generally going to be much more > efficient to allow the result to provide the full data for the people > matched (which would include the URI for each person as a standalone > entity). What do the REST advocates think is appropriate for a case like > this - allow a response which includes a set of resources, or require > each resource to be accessed directly and damn the cost?
I'd love to know what people think of this as well. In my application (http://www.frevvo.com/blog/?p=26), I have forms that edit multiple [XML] documents. When the form is submitted, I generate a document set, which has a URI. For performance (and other) reasons, I've compromised as follows: If you access the URI, you get the entire document set. If you access the URI with ?output-type=uri-list, you get the list of individual document URIs. The thinking is that you specify the desired representation of the document set resource. Sounds reasonable? Thx, -Ashish ----- Ashish Deshpande Founder, frevvo LLC.; http://www.frevvo.com frevvo Blog: http://www.frevvo.com/blog
