Re: REST and DELETE?

hello.

On 2012-08-09 11:52 , Mike Kelly wrote:
> On Thu, Aug 9, 2012 at 10:41 AM, Dan Haywood
> <[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
>     On the second of those posts Stefan Tilkov made (what I thought was)
>     a very pertinent comment:
>     /I think this is a specific case of the general scenario where
>     resources are coupled behind the scenes. If they're part of the same
>     "service", that's fine; if they're not, it violates the idea of
>     loose coupling./
>     /In other words: If I define cart and order processing as being part
>     of the same application or service, I can use the approach you
>     criticize. If I aim to design them so they're independent, your
>     alternative is better./
>     I thought that was pretty insightful.
> Absolutely, key is that this is a design consideration rather than a
> violation of any constraint.

in theory, that's true. in practice, most people see no problem saying 
their cart is /cart/42 and that orders go to /cart/42/order and have no 
indication in the request that the order is about /cart/42. then when 
they want to switch to a different ordering mechanism, they break 
things, because they did not understand the implicit coupling between 
/cart/42/order and /cart/42/. my general strategy therefore is to 
strongly encourage designers to not couple things this way, because the 
advantages are minimal, and the potential problems substantial.

cheers,

dret.

-- 
erik wilde | mailto:[email protected]  -  tel:+1-510-2061079 |
            | UC Berkeley  -  School of Information (ISchool) |
            | http://dret.net/netdret http://twitter.com/dret |