Re: How much REST should your Web API get?

Once again you have given me much to ponder.  Thanks for the effort; I will be trying to internalize this.

-Mike

On May 4, 2013, at 1:49 PM, "Markus Lanthaler" <[email protected]> wrote:

> 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
>