Hey there,

I have a decent understanding of RESTful urls and all the theory behind not nesting urls, but I'm still not quite sure how this looks in an enterprise application, like something like Amazon, StackOverflow, or Google...

Google has urls like this:

• http://code.google.com/apis/ajax/
• http://code.google.com/apis/maps/documentation/staticmaps/
• https://www.google.com/calendar/render?tab=mc

Amazon like this:

• http://www.amazon.com/books-used-books-textbooks/b/ref=sa_menu_bo0?ie=UTF8&node=283155&pf_rd_p=328655101&pf_rd_s=left-nav-1&pf_rd_t=101&pf_rd_i=507846&pf_rd_m=ATVPDKIKX0DER&pf_rd_r=1PK4ZKN4YWJJ9B86ANC9
• http://www.amazon.com/Ruby-Programming-Language-David-Flanagan/dp/0596516177/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1258755625&sr=1-1

And StackOverflow like this:

• http://stackoverflow.com/users/169992/viatropos
• http://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/html
• http://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged?tagnames=html&sort=newest&pagesize=15

So my question is, what is best practice in terms of creating urls for systems like these? When do you start storing parameters in the url, when don't you? These big companies don't seem to be following the rules so hotly debated in the ruby community (that you should almost never nest URLs for example), so I'm wondering how you go about implementing your own urls in larger scale projects because it seems like the idea of not nesting urls breaks down at anything larger than a blog.

Any tips?