On Feb 24, 2009, at 6:26 AM, Antony Blakey wrote:
On 24/02/2009, at 9:29 PM, Jan Lehnardt wrote:
CouchDB documents are limited to JSON (application/json) as the
content, that doesn't make the API less RESTful. If that's not the
right answer, I don't understand what you mean.
application/json doesn't define the semantics of the payload e.g.
how to interact with the resource. To do that it would have to be
application/json+couchdoc et al.
and it uses externally defined URL structures to effect operations.
Can you elaborate on that?
To be RESTful, the means of constructing URLs needs to be defined by
the media type specification. For example, having ?rev= is a rule
that is external to both the media type and the document.
A RESTful API would have a single entry point, with every other URL
and service constructed/discovered by processing the content,
applying the rules of the media type to the content to construct new
URLS, just like HTML. The HTML web doesn't have a manual describing
how to effect operations by constructing certain URLs beyond the
interpretation of the content.
With Chris Andersons's "show" document and "list" view work, we have
the beginnings of that.
-Damien
