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I’ve just been reading about REST URLs and seen the following example:
/API/User/GetUser
Now if this is accessed over HTTP with a verb GET isn’t this a bad URL becuase it describes the action (GET) in the URL?
There is no such thing as a REST URL. In fact, the word REST URL is pretty much an oxymoron. The Hypermedia As The Engine Of Application State Constraint guarantees that URLs are irrelevant: you are only ever following links presented to you by the server, anyway. You never see, read or type a URI anywhere. (Just like browsing the web: you don’t look at the URL of a link, read it, memorize it and then type it into the address bar; you just click on it and don’t care what it actually says.)
The term REST URL implies that you care about your URLs in your REST architecture. However, if you care about your URLs in your REST architecture, you are not RESTful. Therefore, REST URL is an oxymoron.
[Note: Proper URI design is very important for the URI-ness of a URI, especially the I part. Also, there’s plenty of good usability reasons for pretty URLs. But both of these have nothing whatsoever to do with REST.]