Re: the meaning of stateless

On Apr 21, 2013, at 7:52 PM, Brian Craft <[email protected]> wrote:



Fielding's definition didn't do much for me, because the terms aren't
adequately defined, and there aren't enough examples to clarify his intent.
Also, some of the claims seem to be at odds with practice. Again, the "POST
to query" thing involves storing state between requests, while Fielding
says RESTful APIs are better because of "not having to store state between
requests". Well, which is it?


I think a key distinction is creating and destroying resources vs. other
kinds of state. The former is a key feature of REST.

And more generally, I'm trying to understand what REST is all about. It's
clear that the overwhelming majority of people who use the term REST
actually mean nothing more than AJAX. They merely haven't investigated at
all what it is supposed to mean. Of the small minority who mean something
more than AJAX, one gets the impression that there isn't any set of three
people who agree on what it means. So, it's a popular buzzword, and perhaps
a religion, but is it actually a design pattern, and is it actually useful,
and can it actually be used to design a substantial application with
existing technologies?


I recommend researching "hypermedia" for a higher signal to noise ratio
about REST.


Matt McClure
http://matthewlmcclure.com
http://www.mapmyfitness.com/profile/matthewlmcclure