Re: [Pki-devel] Proposed RESTful interface to dogtag

On 10/17/2011 08:10 PM, Jack Magne wrote: I think you have it backwards. PUT is the normal way for creating things. The POST operation is very generic and no specific meaning can be attached to it. In general, use POST when only a subset of a resource needs to be modified and it cannot be accessed as its own resource; or when the equivalent of a method call must be exposed. http://developer.mindtouch.com/REST/REST_for_the_Rest_of_Us says this about POST: " usually either create a new one, or replace the existing one with this copy, where as POST is kinds of a catch all. " We could possibly use PUT for both add and modify if we wanted. I tend to favor making objects immutable, and to replacing whole objects when possible. However, I know that is not always possible, especially when working with a pre-existing API. So I'd say lets try to stick to PUT semantics where possible, but deliberately use POST when we are making finer grain API calls. In general, REST works best if the service is stateless. Session based information should be minimized if possible. I am not a fan of annotations. Under other circumstances, I might be prone to say "well, that is the way of the world" and go with JAX-RS, but since we don not yet have a set of Entity objects that would drive the JAX-RS, I am more prone to look at other alternatives. THere are good libraries for serializing to JSON or XML that should be sufficient for our needs, and that will keep us from having to make our API conform to JAX-RS. So my inclination is to say no to JAX-RS to start. Ade's document has founds its way into the wiki world: http://pki.fedoraproject.org/wiki/Dogtag_Future_Directions I might have made some Wiki errors in translation. If this contradicts Ade's spreadsheet, assume the spreadsheet is Canonical.