Question

What are REST resources and how do they relate to resource names and resource representations?

I read a few articles on the subject, but they were too abstract and they left me more confused than I was before.

Is the following URL a resource? If it is, what is the name of that resource and what is its representation?

http://api.example.com/users.json?length=2&offset=5

The GET response of the URL should look something like:

[
   {
      id: 6,
      name: "John"
   },
   {
      id: 7,
      name: "Jane"
   }
]

Answer 1

What’s a Resource?

A resource is anything that’s important enough to be referenced as a
thing in itself. If your users might “want to create a hypertext link
to it, make or refute assertions about it, retrieve or cache a
representation of it, include all or part of it by reference into
another representation, annotate it, or perform other operations on
it”, then you should make it a resource.

Usually, a resource is something that can be stored on a computer and
represented as a stream of bits: a document, a row in a database, or
the result of running an algorithm. A resource may be a physical
object like an apple, or an abstract concept like courage, but (as
we’ll see later) the representations of such resources are bound to be
disappointing. Here are some possible resources:

• Version 1.0.3 of the software release
• The latest version of the software release
• The first weblog entry for October 24, 2006
• A road map of Little Rock, Arkansas
• Some information about jellyfish
• A directory of resources pertaining to jellyfish
• The next prime number after 1024
• The next five prime numbers after 1024
• The sales numbers for Q42004
• The relationship between two acquaintances, Alice and Bob
• A list of the open bugs in the bug database

The text is from the O’Reilly book "RESTful Web Services".