[Catalyst] REST-like url question

[Alejandro Imass]

On Wed, May 18, 2011 at 3:32 PM, Alejandro Imass
<alejandro.imass at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Wed, May 18, 2011 at 2:50 PM, John M. Dlugosz <wxju46gefd at snkmail.com> wrote:
>>

[...]

> Yeah, let me re-phrase. The REST URLs must look more like paths on a
> drive rather than an API. The URL parameters can be used freely (and
> must be used in many cases) as extra information for the GET request.
> For example, for filtering a collection, for conditioning the result,
> the presentation and in general for _conditioning_ the GET.
>

I want to point out that the OP only referred to the GET URL.

Furthermore, let's remember that in HTML 4 forms are a usually
representation of a resource (the representation is actually HTML but
the form usually presents data to the user).  In other words, forms in
HTML 4 are the only way to serialize data, or to represent data in the
HTML doc. XHTML offers more, but in the end most interactions in Web
1.0 and Web 1.5 (just to give a name to Web 1.0 + AJAX), are done with
the html form artifact. This limits you to GET and POST for the action
method of the form. anything you want to do RESTful (PUT, HEAD,
DELETE) will probably require the use of JavaScript and some other
serialization scheme (XML or JSON, I prefer the latter for many
reasons).

So then your resources as such would be invisible to your browser URL,
maybe or maybe not depending on your far REST you want to go. For full
Web 2.0 REST your URL in the browser would probably point to the
application URL, that is an HTML Shell with a lot of JavaScript. The
interactions from there on will be AJAX from JS and your URL in the
browser would probably not change that much and your resources will be
XML or JSON. Beleive it or not this actually more "Web"/REST that what
we have today!

Best,

--
Alejandro Imass