First of all, REST is not a religion and should not be approached as such. While there are advantages to RESTful services, you should only follow the tenets of REST as far as they make sense for your application. That said, authentication and client side state do not violate REST principles. While REST requires that … Read more
From the RFC (3023), under section 3, XML Media Types: If an XML document — that is, the unprocessed, source XML document — is readable by casual users, text/xml is preferable to application/xml. MIME user agents (and web user agents) that do not have explicit support for text/xml will treat it as text/plain, for example, … Read more
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
When a URL is like domain/search/?q=haha, you would use request.GET.get(‘q’, ”). q is the parameter you want, and ” is the default value if q isn’t found. However, if you are instead just configuring your URLconf**, then your captures from the regex are passed to the function as arguments (or named arguments). Such as: (r’^user/(?P<username>\w{0,50})/$’, … 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
I noticed this question a couple of days late, but I feel that I can add some insight. I hope this can be helpful towards your RESTful venture. Point 1: Am I understanding it right? You understood right. That is a correct representation of a RESTful architecture. You may find the following matrix from Wikipedia … Read more
Representational state transfer (REST) is a style of software architecture. As described in a dissertation by Roy Fielding, REST is an “architectural style” that basically exploits the existing technology and protocols of the Web. RESTful is typically used to refer to web services implementing such an architecture.
A great resource to pick the correct HTTP error code for your API: http://www.codetinkerer.com/2015/12/04/choosing-an-http-status-code.html An excerpt from the article: Where to start: 2XX/3XX: 4XX: 5XX:
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