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POWhat am I not understanding about REST?
 

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    <p>I'm building a framework and want developers who build with it to have the ability to allow parts of it to both share data with other sites and allow other sites to add/edit/delete data.</p> <p>For example, if someone makes a site that has book reviews, authors, quotes, code examples, comments, etc. the developer could make e.g. "book reviews" read-only for other sites and "comments" readable by other sites and writable by certain sites/users. The idea is to use the framework to build applications that can easily be interconnected with other applications.</p> <p>I envision enabling all interaction with the site via POST and GET which would look something like this:</p> <ul> <li><strong>/books.php?category=ruby</strong> (returns an XML collection of books about ruby)</li> <li><strong>/books.php?id=23</strong> (returns the XML for a specific book)</li> <li><strong>/books.php?action=add&amp;title=AdvancedRuby&amp;description=....&amp;securityId=923847203487</strong></li> <li><strong>/books.php?action=delete&amp;id=342&amp;securityId=923847203487</strong></li> </ul> <p>Other applications could also "discover and consume" what a certain site has to offer by doing this:</p> <ul> <li><strong>/discover.php</strong> (returns XML of all public classes and actions available)</li> </ul> <p>Really this is all I need to enable the framework to be a way for developers to quickly create loosely connected sites.</p> <p><strong>What I want to know is, before I begin implementing this, are there significant/interesting parts of REST that I do not yet understand which I should be building into the framework</strong>, e.g.:</p> <ul> <li>REST requires GET, POST, PUT and DELETE. Why would I ever need "PUT" and "DELETE"? Am I locking myself out from taking advantage of some standard if I dont' use these?</li> <li>My "discover.php" file functions similarly to a WSDL file in web services. I am surprised in descriptions of REST there seems to be no standardized way of discovering the services that a RESTful service offers, or is there?</li> <li>If a client website tries to e.g. add a book to a server website and does not get any "success" response back, it would simply try again until it got a response. The server website would simply not add the same book twice. This is my understanding of data integrity in REST, is there more to it than this?</li> <li><p>eventually I want to have multiple sites that have the same rich classes e.g. "BookReview" so that a client site would be able to execute code such as this:</p> <p><strong>$bookReview = new BookReview("<a href="http://www.example.com/books.php?id=23" rel="nofollow noreferrer">http://www.example.com/books.php?id=23</a>"); $book->informAuthor("a comment about your book review was posted on our site...");</strong></p></li> </ul> <p>and the server site would send an e-mail off to the author of that review. Is this type of type interaction a component of the RESTful philosophy or is REST simply the exchange of data via XML, JSON?</p>
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    1. USEdward Tanguay
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    1. COAs a side note, never use GET for a DELETE action, use POST.
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    2. COI think the key thing that you are not understanding is the grandiose-sounding "Hypermedia as the Engine of Application State" or HATEOAS concept. You talk a lot about your URL structure, but actually need to talk about the media types and how they "link" to each other. See Vinko Vrsalovic's answer for a pointer in the right direction and my comment there, and just read more about HATEOAS until it starts to actually make sense. Took me a while ;)
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