Comments on: RESTful POSTing http://benramsey.com/archives/restful-posting/ PHP and Other Techno-babble Sat, 22 Nov 2008 09:18:34 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.5.1 By: paul morgan http://benramsey.com/archives/restful-posting/#comment-7845 paul morgan Fri, 22 Dec 2006 14:21:48 +0000 http://benramsey.com/archives/restful-posting/#comment-7845 You may find the following two sites useful in getting to grips with REST and the concept of valid POSTing to simlar URLs. The "REST dialogues" are quite interesting. Duncan also heavily pushes the ATOM Publishing Protocol as the way to go. <a href="http://duncan-cragg.org/blog" rel="nofollow">duncan cragg</a> .. and a couter point from an Ebay developer to some of duncan's points in the REST dialogues <a href="http://www.addsimplicity.com/" rel="nofollow">Dan Pritchett</a> hth You may find the following two sites useful in getting to grips with REST and the concept of valid POSTing to simlar URLs. The “REST dialogues” are quite interesting. Duncan also heavily pushes the ATOM Publishing Protocol as the way to go.

duncan cragg

.. and a couter point from an Ebay developer to some of duncan’s points in the REST dialogues
Dan Pritchett

hth

]]> By: Norman Gerre http://benramsey.com/archives/restful-posting/#comment-7815 Norman Gerre Thu, 21 Dec 2006 22:40:12 +0000 http://benramsey.com/archives/restful-posting/#comment-7815 It's worth reading the Atom Publishing Protocol spec if you're interested in RESTful design. Don't forget the other HTTP status codes: POSTing a new set of customer data to <code>/customer</code> should return a <code>201 Created</code> status code along with the location of the new resource. It also sounds like you might still not be clear on what it means to be a "unique resources" -- a resource is anything which can be identified by a URI. It's perfectly acceptable to define <code>/customer</code> as "the details of the currently-visiting customer", for example. It is <strong>conceptually unique</strong>, even though it returns a different HTML representation for each viewer. You would probably use the <code>Content-Location</code> header to point to a more specific URI, like <code>/customer/{customer_id}</code>. Dereferencing either URI could return the same HTML; what matters is the conceptual difference. /blog/posts/1 is "the first post in the blog" /blog/2002/01/01/frist-psot is "the blog entry posted on 2002-01-01 titled 'frist-psot'". It's the same content, but two different resources with slightly different semantics. What really matters is that you think in terms of nouns instead of verbs. "create-customer.php" is wrong because it contains a verb (create), and REST requires that you use only GET, POST, PUT and DELETE. Instead of inventing your own verb, you use POST to append an item to the "collection-of-users" (<code>/customer</code>) noun. Beyond that it's just a matter of good design versus bad -- using the *right* nouns. It’s worth reading the Atom Publishing Protocol spec if you’re interested in RESTful design.

Don’t forget the other HTTP status codes: POSTing a new set of customer data to /customer should return a 201 Created status code along with the location of the new resource.

It also sounds like you might still not be clear on what it means to be a “unique resources”—a resource is anything which can be identified by a URI. It’s perfectly acceptable to define /customer as “the details of the currently-visiting customer”, for example. It is conceptually unique, even though it returns a different HTML representation for each viewer. You would probably use the Content-Location header to point to a more specific URI, like /customer/{customer_id}. Dereferencing either URI could return the same HTML; what matters is the conceptual difference.

/blog/posts/1 is “the first post in the blog”
/blog/2002/01/01/frist-psot is “the blog entry posted on 2002-01-01 titled ‘frist-psot’”.

It’s the same content, but two different resources with slightly different semantics.

What really matters is that you think in terms of nouns instead of verbs. “create-customer.php” is wrong because it contains a verb (create), and REST requires that you use only GET, POST, PUT and DELETE. Instead of inventing your own verb, you use POST to append an item to the “collection-of-users” (/customer) noun. Beyond that it’s just a matter of good design versus bad—using the right nouns.

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