Question

This is one of those little detail (and possibly religious) questions. Let’s assume we’re constructing a REST architecture, and for definiteness lets assume the service needs three parameters, x, y, and z. Reading the various works about REST, it would seem that this should be expressed as a URI like

http://myservice.example.com/service/ x / y / z

Having written a lot of CGIs in the past, it seems about as natural to express this

http://myservice.example.com/service?x=val,y=val,z=val

Is there any particular reason to prefer the all-slashes form?

Answer 1

The reason is small but here it is.

Cool URI’s Don’t Change.

The http://myservice.example.com/resource/x/y/z/ form makes a claim in front of God and everybody that this is the path to a specific resource.

Note that I changed the name. There may be a service involved, but the REST principle is that you’re describing a specific web resource, named /x/y/z/.

The http://myservice.example.com/service?x=val,y=val,z=val form doesn’t make as strong a claim. It says there’s a piece of code named service that will try to do some sort of query. No guarantees.