Without looking at the slides and the following posts, can you guess what was missing?
If someone is going to give a presentation on REST, it is likely that they will emphasise the more popular aspects of REST: resource, resource identification, representation of the resource and the uniform methods for interacting and manipulating the resource.
Many presentations that I have seen would further concentrate on the look-and-feel of "REST-ful" URLs, giving the audiences the wrong message that REST is primarily about URL construction. Josh Sled brought a good example of how even a big-name (I'm not telling who, go figure it out from the look-and-feel of the URL) development group got REST wrong: http://developer.yahoo.com/photos/V3.0/createAlbum.html. Whatever do they mean by "Passed in as a REST parameter.", I wonder. Quick, the server ate too many REST parameters, pass in the non-REST ones.
What is missing is hypermedia. It's the last constraint mentioned in the dissertation. http://www.ics.uci.edu/~fielding/pubs/dissertation/rest_arch_style.htm section 5.1.5:
REST is defined by four interface constraints: identification of resources; manipulation of resources through representations; self-descriptive messages; and, hypermedia as the engine of application state.But whatever does "hypermedia as the engine of application state" mean? I like Mark Baker's explanation:
Hypermedia as the engine of application state" is simply a long-winded way of saying that REST clients make progress via links embedded in the data they retrieve. That sounds like an almost information-free statement, but it's not difficult to violate this constraint, and it can be quite costly to do so as well.For example, if you have a blog, and there is an entry for 2007-05-11, from your home page, there should be a link pointing to that entry. User and client should not be expected to guess how to get there.
Just as state is explicitly represented and transferred, so must the transitions.
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