Comments from Jon Miner, responses from Jim Fox

Reviewing Guidelines for Designing RESTful APIs in TIER ….  +1 to Chris' idea of merging at least the metadata portion of the common elements in, if not all of them.  I can't see a reason not to, but I feel like I'm overlooking something.

Generally is seems straightforward to me…  Comments/questions (as I read top-to-bottom):

  • Do we want to support pagination at all?  As the SCIM docs mention (and anybody who has implemented knows), it's generally a disaster and not used unless you're keeping connection state (like LDAP or a DB).
    • JimF: There are times where the entire document is too big.
  • I agree completely on plurals vs non-plurals, but how do we handle "update" or "add" operations (PUT/POST) on the set?  It tends to get un-REST-ful that way?  I can't help thinking about it that way, though.
    • JimF: I think the plural/non-plural is silly.  It's part of the location of a resource.  If the result is a list then that's documented somewhere.  I'll note that database people tend to use singular nouns for tables, even though they contain multiple rows.
  • Security.. it feels like we should mandate HTTPS, of course, but leave everything else to environment (presumably Basic?) ..  Do we want to get in to thinking about externalizing authorizations?
    • JimF In some sense not specifying authorization is externalizing it.

Feels like I should have more commentary, and I'm sure I do, but my brain is feeling scrambled at the moment (perfect timing for the call!)

jon


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