Re^2: Combining a web application and a REST application under a single URI?

Yep, exactly.

For the human-friendly pages with forms on them, and the URIs that handle them, you probably can’t get away with talking to the REST API directly, though. To be usable, the human interface often needs to handle updating multiple resources at once in some fashion, or may have functional aspects that can’t be associated with any particular resource in the system. Trying to build an interface that rigidly follows the resource structure of an app just makes for a mediocre user experience, at best.

So I’d have the bookmarkable friendly URIs be capable of returning both human-friendly and machine-readable representations via Accept, and maybe also have them respond to programmatic access (by PUTting/POSTting with a request body with XML or JSON or something like that), but I’d have a separate URI space to handle the browser-based editing UI.

Makeshifts last the longest.

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Re^3: Combining a web application and a REST application under a single URI?
by talexb (Chancellor) on Jul 21, 2006 at 14:29 UTC

So I’d have the bookmarkable friendly URIs be capable of returning both human-friendly and machine-readable representations via Accept, and maybe also have them respond to programmatic access (by PUTing/POSTing with a request body with XML or JSON or something like that), but I’d have a separate URI space to handle the browser-based editing UI.

My plan is to provide RESTful access via the Accept header types of text/xml and application/xml, and web access (menus, CSS) for application/xhtml+xml and text/html. The problem that I'm trying to solve now is that Firefox uses the following accept header: Accept: text/xml,application/xml,application/xhtml+xml,text/html;q=0.9,text/plain;q=0.8,image/png,*/*;q=0.5. I guess this means my application will always have to provide HTML of some sort, unless the script asks only for XML, in which case I provide XML, in a "Just the facts, Ma'am" [1] format.

Alex / talexb / Toronto

"Groklaw is the open-source mentality applied to legal research" ~ Linus Torvalds

1. Obligatory link to Snopes for the pedants in the crowd. The quote is actually "All we want are the facts, ma'am."

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