Hello again. After reading some interesting posts about REST, specially
[1] REST APIs must be hypertext-driven [2] Describing RESTful Applications I started to think that my own RESTish implementation of a "service midleware" wasn't very RESTish at all. Basically because it hadn't that much of that HATEOAS constraint. Now that was not a big problem because all the services implemented on top of that "service layer" where a kind of basic "request-response only" where there were very few situations where I had to change from a "state" returned by the service to another, subsequent state. It was more like a "data-centric" access like GET http://localhost:8080/rest/data/person/101 <person> <firstName>TONINHO</firstName> <lastName>METRALHA</lastName> <account>010123101</account> </person> and that is enough because that's all the info I need for now and it's convenient to serialize/deserialize in Java using XStream. But of course if it were a just litlle more complex example I start to loose expandability and extensibility and restability... So, based on [2] I was wondering in change my data a bit (actually a few bits), like this GET http://localhost:8080/rest/data/person/101 <person> <firstName>TONINHO</firstName> <lastName>METRALHA</lastName> <account href="http://localhost:8080/rest/data/bank/accounts/010123101 ">010123101</account> </person> This way I keep the "data-centric" aspect of the service while getting the benefits of HATEOAS when/where I need it. Is this a good approach in the light of HATEOAS? Also, referring to [2], all that use of "extended" media-types, like application/vnd.bank.org.account+xml is a correct use of the concept of "hipertext as the engine of application state"? Or putting in another way, the use of Media-Types to describe the *structure* (as opposed to the *nature*) of a data-centric response is correct, under a restfull point-of-view?? Thanks all. [1] http://roy.gbiv.com/untangled/2008/rest-apis-must-be-hypertext-driven [2] http://www.infoq.com/articles/subbu-allamaraju-rest _______________________________________________ Melhores cumprimentos / Beir beannacht / Best regards António Manuel dos Santos Mota mobile PT: +351919623568 (deprecated) mobile IE: +353(0)877718363 mail: [email protected] skype: amsmota msn: [email protected] linkedin: www.linkedin.com/in/amsmota _______________________________________________ ------------------------------------------------------ http://restlet.tigris.org/ds/viewMessage.do?dsForumId=4447&dsMessageId=999939
