Michael Terrington wrote:
Ordered does not necessarily mean hierarchical.
Hierarchy == Ordered, in my mind (particularly as it involves REST).
I mean, if we're talking about Hierarchy in the object oriented frame of
mind (ie. "IS A" type hierarchy), then maybe you have something. But,
we're talking about something different. You're thinking about it more
in terms of passing parameters to a method, and I am thinking about it
more in terms of information organization.
In this example, say I have a whole bunch of these translations in plain
text files. I don't have any other information beyond the "From" and
"To" languages (and maybe a unique identifier or timestamp), how am I
going to organize these on my hard drive?
I could store them all in one folder, with commas separating the
languages in each filename. Or, I can have a hierarchy of folders
organized per language. Like this (just to be silly):
C:\Documents and Settings\Adam\My Documents\Translations\en\de\{id}.txt
C:\Documents and Settings\Adam\My Documents\Translations\de\en\{id}.txt
The point of REST is NOT about ordered parameter passing. You have SOAP
for that. Instead, REST is about information organization, which is why
I like the slashes better since they're a better or more familiar
metaphor for organized data.
By the way, this brought me to one more conclusion about the design of
the original poster's REST application. I think his new resource
reference URLs are wrong. In the example, he says that the new
reference is in the form of:
../jobs/8fc66aca2ae1aa792ea35b8012acb6
That's ok, but it could be better. It would be better by including the
unique key in the original POSTed hierarchy. Ie.
../jobs/en/de/8fc66aca2ae1aa792ea35b8012acb6
(assuming that the original POST was to ../jobs/en/de/)
Adam
