REST Not for Humans?
March 29, 2007
Dave Thomas writes (emphasis mine):
Does that mean I’m down on the RESTful, CRUD based approach to application development? Not at all. For some categories of application, I think it’s a great way of structuring your code. But REST isn’t designed for talking to people.
Huh?
That’s definitely the first time I’ve heard this assertion — usually, it’s just the other way around.
There’s nothing unRESTful in returning an HTML “view” representation at http://example.com/employees/1, and a form to edit the same resource at http://example.com/employees/1;edit — provided you view these two things as different resources, and not two representations of the same resource. This is is a somewhat philosophical question. Even more importantly, reducing REST to back-end logic only seems to stress the (pretty broken) CRUD analogy way too much for my taste, which will ultimately lead to misunderstandings.
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This page contains a single entry from Stefan Tilkov's Random Stuff posted on March 29, 2007 7:16 PM. The previous post in this blog was JBoss Rules and JavaSpaces. The next post in this blog is Yahoo! Mail API Madness. Many more can be found on the main index page or by looking through the archives.
