Mike,
The safari signup requires a credit card which I'm not going to give so
I'm afraid I can't comment after seeing the book.
It has always been my understanding that the /Earth/France/Paris style
of notation is a search engine optimised (SEO) layer which has the
design goal of being descriptive to humans and search engines and is not
designed with the REST principals of performance and efficiency.
The main problem with performance is that, in most cases, you're going
to be looking the data up in a database table, therefore you have your
unique ID as the primary key for the table. The data in the table may,
in turn, be a reference to a storage device and location where the data
is stored, but at the top level you have the single primary key, hence
the single /noun/id combination.
If you're thinking of mapping the book to a folder name and the chapter
to a filename in the folder then I would urge you to look at some of the
comments around the web on how flat file systems scale, and possibly
think about an intermediate table which maps IDs to the location of the
chapter data which would allow you to have separate file stores to
spread the data accross.
Al.
Mike Watson wrote:
Thanks for the feedback.
I actually disagree regarding whether my url syntax is restful.
Have you read the O'Reilly book: "RESTful Web Services" by Leonard
Richardson; Sam Ruby?
If not please take a look (you can probably see sample chapters on
Safari if you don't have an account).
Specifically in section 5.5.1 Encode Heirarchy into Path Variables
where examples like this are provided:
http://maps.example.com/Earth/France/Paris
In fact the samples the entire book is based on all rely on hierarchy.
Hierarchy is *very* relevant to my problem domain and is something
that a RESTful interface *should* be able to support. Do you not agree
a news website is hierarchical? The web is hierarchical in nature.
REST is supposed to be the language of the web...
If the REST plugin can't support this hierarchical model I'd say it is
fundamentally flawed. I'm happy to help rectify this but to say that
this approach just isn't REST is simply not true.
Can anybody suggest where I would start in an attempt to implement
this hierarchical model? Or do I need to start looking for a
replacement for the Struts2 REST plugin?
Thanks for your time.
Mike
2008/6/17 Al Sutton <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>:
It's true that it takes a bit of reading between the lines, but basically
REST relies on unique identifiers for resources, which for HTTP is commonly
taken to mean a URLs of the form;
http://server/resource_noun/id
(to confirm this have a spin through the google results showing various
examples).
With servers with many apps on this is commonly expanded to;
http://server/app/resource_noun/id
In the strictest send the Mikes URLs should be;
http://www.mydomain.com/chapter/123_1
because we are uniquely identifying a chapter and to do this we need to
include the book id, but for the sake of clarity (which was the reason I
beleive he was using x/x_id/y/y_id notation I expanded the noun to show book
and chapter.
Al.
Laurie Harper wrote:
It may be the case that the REST plugin can't support this (I don't know
if that's true) but I don't see anything in the cited reference that says
such URLs are un-RESTful. And a Struts apps should certainly be able to
support them, even if it requires writing a little more code (e.g. a custom
action mapper?)
L.
Al Sutton wrote:
Mike,
Rest URLs doesn't work that way, so the plugin is correct and your needs
are not in sync with REST standards (see
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Representational_State_Transfer for a more
details on REST).
If you want to do something with multiple IDs my suggestion would be URLs
along the lines of;
http://www.mydomain.com/rest/bookAndChapter/123_1
Al.
Mike Watson wrote:
Hi Folks,
I'm trying to use the REST plugin to implement a service that serves
resources using the following url syntax:
http://www.mydomain.com/rest/book/123 (which works fine)
http://www.mydomain.com/rest/book/123/chapter (which throws a 500
because my book controller doesn't have a chapter() method)
http://www.mydomain.com/rest/book/123/chapter/1 (which returns 404)
I'd expect the two chapter urls to access the ChapterController
instead of the BookController.
Being able to request resources 'within resources' like this is
crucial to my application. Can anybody tell me how I can configure the
rest plugin to behave like this, or point me at some documentation
that does?
Thanks in advance,
Mike
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