RE: How much REST should your Web API get?

On Saturday, May 04, 2013 7:03 PM, Mike Schinkel wrote:
> Hmm.  Okay, the more I think I understand about REST the more I think
> I don't understand and/or am unsure who actually really understands
> REST besides Roy.
> 
> As I've read Roy I've come away understanding that messages must be
> self-contained

No, you are confusing self-contained with self-descriptive.


> and the only thing the client should know is how the
> links in the returned representation are defined to behave as defined
> by the representation's content yype. Having links in one document and
> data in a second document where you have to have the contents of both
> documents seems to me to violate that need for self-containment.

... if there would be a self-containment constraint that would be true --
but there isn't.


> I do have one question; if there is a home document that is cacheable
> for some period "X" and at the time immediately after an API client
> retrieves the home document the servers are moved and the client later
> perform an operation that requires URLs from the home document but
> before "X" time has passed, it can cause failure.  If the message is
> self-contained that time window is greatly reduced. This is one of the
> reasons I can postulate there is a need for self-contained messages.

That doesn't matter at all. Program defensively, detect the error, and
recover.

I could just as well argue that separating them allows you to request them
in parallel which would probably be faster so the time window you are
talking about would be reduced even further.



--
Markus Lanthaler
@markuslanthaler