Tilkov: RESTful? a few simple questions

2008-12-11 @ 18:30#

can't really say it better than this:

One of the claims often made against REST is that there's a lot of disagreement around it – that nobody can define whether something is RESTful or not. ... The REST community actually very easily agrees on whether or not something is RESTful or not when it's put up for judgment. And the nice thing is that you can easily get very close to answering this yourself by looking at a Web API that claims to be "RESTful", and see if it really is using a few simple questions:

a quick summary of his points:

  • Do the URIs actually identify resources, or do they encode operations?
  • Are the HTTP verbs – GET, PUT, POST, DELETE – used according to their defined meaning?
  • Is hypermedia used, i.e. are there links in the representations that a client can follow?
  • Are MIME types used to differentiate data types (in Accept and Content-type) headers?
  • Are caching and conditional GET supported, i.e. are there appropriate cache control headers and ETags?

code