I was reading about a blog application that was described as RESTful.
If someone told you their web application was RESTful, what types of features would you assume it contained, to differentiate it from a non-RESTful web application?
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I was reading about a blog application that was described as RESTful.
If someone told you their web application was RESTful, what types of features would you assume it contained, to differentiate it from a non-RESTful web application?
When talking about a web site rather than a web service (which i assume you are), ‘RESTful’ is a fairly weak term, because the web is a fundamentally RESTful system anyway. Points which distinguish a truly RESTful website from others include:
Use HTTP authentication on every request for access control; there should be no login page
Expose only bookmarkable URLs that look the same (if accessible) to all comers; there should be no
/myaccount, only/account/ChuckNot keep any user state in hidden session variables, but only in the URL; if you change your friends page view from summaries to titles only, there should be a change in the URL, and subequently visiting either of those URLs should show the page in the corresponding way
Other than that, it’s mostly a question of being web-like in the way that all sites are: all pages can be reached by traversing links (including submitting forms) from other pages (you never have to munge a URL by hand or know a magic secret URL), responses contain metadata describing what they are (the content-type in the HTTP response), etc.