I don’t really agree with some of you guys. I’ve been working for weeks on this features for my REST service. What I ended up doing is really simple. My solution only makes a sense for what REST people call a collection.
Client MUST include a “Range” header to indicate which part of the collection he needs, or otherwise be ready to handle a 413 REQUESTED ENTITY TOO LARGE error when the requested collection is too large to be retrieved in a single round-trip.
Server sends a 206 PARTIAL CONTENT response, with the Content-Range header specifying which part of the resource has been sent, and an ETag header to identify the current version of the collection. I usually use a Facebook-like ETag {last_modification_timestamp}-{resource_id}, and I consider that the ETag of a collection is that of the most recently modified resource it contains.
To request a specific part of a collection, the client MUST use the “Range” header, and fill the “If-Match” header with the ETag of the collection obtained from previously performed requests to acquire other parts of the same collection. The server can therefore verify that the collection hasn’t changed before sending the requested portion. If a more recent version exists, a 412 PRECONDITION FAILED response is returned to invite the client to retrieve the collection from scratch. This is necessary because it could mean that some resources might have been added or removed before or after the currently requested part.
I use ETag/If-Match in tandem with Last-Modified/If-Unmodified-Since to optimize cache. Browsers and proxies might rely on one or both of them for their caching algorithms.
I think that a URL should be clean unless it’s to include a search/filter query. If you think about it, a search is nothing more than a partial view of a collection. Instead of the cars/search?q=BMW type of URLs, we should see more cars?manufacturer=BMW.