If your action is not idempotent, then you MUST use POST. If you don’t, you’re just asking for trouble down the line. GET, PUT and DELETE methods are required to be idempotent. Imagine what would happen in your application if the client was pre-fetching every possible GET request for your service – if this would … Read more
The fundamental explanation is: No client session state on the server. By stateless it means that the server does not store any state about the client session on the server side. The client session is stored on the client. The server is stateless means that every server can service any client at any time, there … Read more
You should use hyphens in a crawlable web application URL. Why? Because the hyphen separates words (so that a search engine can index the individual words), and a hyphen is not a word character. Underscore is a word character, meaning it should be considered part of a word. Double-click this in Chrome: camelCase Double-click this … Read more
For me is better to have a schema that you can map directly to code (easy to automate), mainly because code is what is going to be at both ends. GET /orders <—> orders POST /orders <—> orders.push(data) GET /orders/1 <—> orders[1] PUT /orders/1 <—> orders[1] = data GET /orders/1/lines <—> orders[1].lines POST /orders/1/lines <—> … Read more
Simple explanation about SOAP and REST SOAP – “Simple Object Access Protocol” SOAP is a method of transferring messages, or small amounts of information, over the Internet. SOAP messages are formatted in XML and are typically sent using HTTP (hypertext transfer protocol). Rest – Representational state transfer Rest is a simple way of sending and … Read more
How to handle authentication in a RESTful Client-Server architecture is a matter of debate. Commonly, it can be achieved, in the SOA over HTTP world via: HTTP basic auth over HTTPS; Cookies and session management; Token in HTTP headers (e.g. OAuth 2.0 + JWT); Query Authentication with additional signature parameters. You’ll have to adapt, or … Read more
This is a good and a tricky question. The topic of URI design is at the same time the most prominent part of a REST API and, therefore, a potentially long-term commitment towards the users of that API. Since evolution of an application and, to a lesser extent, its API is a fact of life … Read more
My feeling is 409 Conflict is the most appropriate, however, seldom seen in the wild of course: The request could not be completed due to a conflict with the current state of the resource. This code is only allowed in situations where it is expected that the user might be able to resolve the conflict … Read more
Unfortunately, there are a lot of misinformation and misconceptions around REST. Not only your question and the answer by @cmd reflect those, but most of the questions and answers related to the subject on Stack Overflow. SOAP and REST can’t be compared directly, since the first is a protocol (or at least tries to be) … Read more
Roy Fielding’s comment about including a body with a GET request. Yes. In other words, any HTTP request message is allowed to contain a message body, and thus must parse messages with that in mind. Server semantics for GET, however, are restricted such that a body, if any, has no semantic meaning to the request. … Read more