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POWell-behaving RESTful Client Interactions
 

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    <p>I have what seems to be a fairly simple question about implementing a data access client that strictly adheres to REST architectural principles. To start, let's assume I have a well-behaving REST API that I want to consume using a Django application. I'll start by discovering what services are available <strong><em>(edited for follow-up)</em></strong>:</p> <pre><code>GET example.com/services/ HTTP/1.1 HTTP/1.1 200 OK &lt;?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?&gt; &lt;services&gt; &lt;service&gt; &lt;name&gt;Widgets&lt;/name&gt; &lt;link&gt;http://example.com/services/widgets/&lt;/link&gt; &lt;item_link&gt;http://example.com/services/widgets/{widget_id}/&lt;/item_link&gt; &lt;/service&gt; &lt;service&gt; &lt;name&gt;Factories&lt;/name&gt; &lt;link&gt;http://example.com/services/factories/&lt;/link&gt; &lt;item_link&gt;http://example.com/services/factories/{factory_id}/&lt;/item_link&gt; &lt;/service&gt; ... &lt;/services&gt; </code></pre> <p>Now, since I'm building a Django application based around consuming this API, how would I continue to keep exploring these services RESTfully? To adhere to REST principles, my application must be driven by the hypermedia received. I suppose the first step is easy enough -- interacting with a service by the name given. I set up a Django view as follows:</p> <pre><code>def get_service(request, service_name): doc = etree.parse(urllib.urlopen('http://example.com/services/')) uri = doc.xpath("service/name[.='%s']/following-sibling::*" % service_name)[0].text ... </code></pre> <p>From which I'll perform another request <strong><em>(edited for follow-up)</em></strong>:</p> <pre><code>GET example.com/services/widgets/ HTTP/1.1 HTTP/1.1 200 OK &lt;?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?&gt; &lt;widgets&gt; &lt;item_link&gt;http://example.com/services/widgets/{widget_id}/&lt;/item_link&gt; &lt;widget&gt; &lt;id&gt;1&lt;/id&gt; &lt;name&gt;Whizbang Foobar&lt;/name&gt; &lt;link&gt;http://example.com/services/widgets/1&lt;/link&gt; &lt;/widget&gt; ... &lt;/widgets&gt; </code></pre> <p>Now I'll display a simple list of widgets in a rendered Django template. From here though, how do I continue to interact with this service RESTfully? Perhaps I've befuddled myself into confusion, but the only <em>reasonable</em> things I can come up with are implementing a numerous amount of application views or a thin Django data model to persist the service URI. </p> <p>My main concern boils down to that this is trivial to do without strictly adhering to REST architectural guidelines, but I feel like I've missed the boat completely in trying to do so. I understand designing proper REST APIs and clients isn't "easy", but it seems that I'm in dire need of a similar example to work through the actual implementation.</p> <p>I apologize for the length and verbosity of the question and the inevitable facepalming of wizened readers.</p> <p><strong><em>Follow-up:</em></strong></p> <p>Is the following a valid way (using URI templates) of implementing these interactions? For demonstration purposes (in lieu of a more abstract implementation), another Django view to retrieve a resource collection item:</p> <pre><code>def get_item(request, service_name, item_id): doc = etree.parse(urllib.urlopen('http://example.com/services/')) uri = doc.xpath("service/name[.='%s']/following-sibling::item_link" % service_name)[0].text ... </code></pre> <p>Then the subsequent request:</p> <pre><code>GET example.com/services/widgets/1 HTTP/1.1 HTTP/1.1 200 OK &lt;?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?&gt; &lt;widget&gt; &lt;id&gt;1&lt;/id&gt; &lt;name&gt;Whizbang Foobar&lt;/name&gt; &lt;tags&gt;foo bar baz ham eggs&lt;/tags&gt; &lt;index_link&gt;http://example.com/services/widgets/&lt;/index_link&gt; &lt;/widget&gt; </code></pre>
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