RESTful? (was: Re: Document Updates)

[Antony Blakey <an...@gmail.com>]

On 15/11/2008, at 8:26 AM, Antony Blakey wrote:

> A landing page with URLs for the design documents would also be  
> needed. View definitions would need a unique media type because  
> currently their meaning is dependent on their location. But maybe  
> I'm misunderstanding REST. So easy.

Thinking about this, it would not only be RESTful to have the server  
root page contain links such as the _bulk_docs URL and a _design/  
index page, it would also make good documentation if it was an HTML  
page. The name of the anchor or the rel attribute could serve to  
indicate link functions.

   <a href='_bulk_docs' rel='bulkDocumentsRPC'>Bulk Document  
Operations</a>
   <a href='_design/'>Design Document Index</a>

I'm guessing that it would be wrong to annotate the _design link with  
a rel because a document isn't a design document by virtue of it's  
URL, and the _design/ URL is really just a view. This suggests to me  
that maybe _design/ shouldn't be hard-coded, but should be just  
another view defined using the existing mechanism e.g. _view/_design.  
This touches on the recent discussion about design docs being passed  
to views.

IMO the reference docs on the Wiki really belong with the code, and an  
obvious feature would be to serve those documents from the server.

I wonder if this idea conforms to this requirement:

"A REST API should spend almost all of its descriptive effort in  
defining the media type(s) used for representing resources and driving  
application state, or in defining extended relation names and/or  
hypertext-enabled mark-up for existing standard media types."

Antony Blakey
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Ph: 0438 840 787

Borrow money from pessimists - they don't expect it back.
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Re: RESTful? (was: Re: Document Updates)

[Noah Slater <ns...@apache.org>]

I think it would be extreemly benificial if we made CouchDB provide self
descriptive hyperlinks that let clients explore the available URI space. Along
with a set of properly defined media types, this could go a long way towards
making CouchDB a truly RESTful database management system.

-- 
Noah Slater, http://tumbolia.org/nslater