Should a given URI in a RESTful architecture always return the same response?

Posted by keithjgrant on Stack Overflow See other posts from Stack Overflow or by keithjgrant
Published on 2010-04-20T16:18:51Z Indexed on 2010/04/20 16:33 UTC
Read the original article Hit count: 320

Filed under:

rest

|

uri

This is kind of a follow-up question to this one.

So is having a unique response for any given URI a core tenant of RESTful architecture? A lot of discussion here tends that direction, but I haven't seen it anywhere as a "hard and fast" rule.

I understand the value of it (for caching, crawling, passing links, etc), but I also see things like the twitter API violate it (A request to http://api.twitter.com/1/statuses/friends_timeline.xml will vary based on the username given), and I understand there are times when it may be necessary--not to mention that a chronologically paged resource will also change as new elements are added.

Should I strive for varied responses from the same URI to be eliminated altogether, or do I just accept that sometimes it isn't practical, and as long as I minimize its occurrence, I'll be in decent shape.

© Stack Overflow or respective owner

Related posts about rest

REST: How to store and reuse REST call queries

as seen on Programmers - Search for 'Programmers'
I'm learning C# by programming a real monstrosity of an application for personal use. Part of my application uses several SPARQL queries like so: const string ArtistByRdfsLabel = @" PREFIX rdf: <http://www.w3.org/1999/02/22-rdf-syntax-ns#> PREFIX rdfs: <http://www.w3.org/2000/01/rdf-schema#> SELECT… >>> More
REST Framework - MS Web Api vs the rest of the field

as seen on Programmers - Search for 'Programmers'
I am a .NET developer who is looking into the OSS world for a REST framework similar to Microsoft's Web Api. I'll be starting a personal project soon and need to develop both a web site and an API with the API coming first. I've ruled out Ruby on Rails just because I feel that with my background… >>> More
Self Hosted WCF REST Service or Hosting WCF REST Service in Console Application

as seen on C# Corner - Search for 'C# Corner'
n this article, I will show you How to create a REST based service, How to host a REST,based service in Console application and How to consume a REST Service at client. >>> More
Trouble determining proper decoding of a REST response from an ArcGIS REST service using IHttpModule

as seen on Stack Overflow - Search for 'Stack Overflow'
First a little background on what I am trying to achieve. I have an application that is utilizing REST services served by ArcGIS Server and IIS7. The REST services return data in one of several different formats. I am requesting a JSON response. I want to be able to modify the response (remove… >>> More
WCF REST on .Net 4.0

as seen on Geeks with Blogs - Search for 'Geeks with Blogs'
A simple and straight forward article taken from: http://christopherdeweese.com/blog2/post/drop-the-soap-wcf-rest-and-pretty-uris-in-net-4 Drop the Soap: WCF, REST, and Pretty URIs in .NET 4 Years ago I was working in libraries when the Web 2.0 revolution began. One of the things that caught… >>> More

Related posts about uri

Creating custom URI scheme using URI class

as seen on Stack Overflow - Search for 'Stack Overflow'
I need to create a custom URI scheme for my project. i.e urn:myprotocol:{p1}:{p2}:{p3}:{p4} - opaque representation myprotocol://{p1}/{p2}/{p3}/{p4} - hierarchical representation. How can I add my scheme to Java URI class? Or, how can I make Java URI to understand my scheme, so I could use it… >>> More
validate that URI is valid http URI

as seen on Stack Overflow - Search for 'Stack Overflow'
Hi all, My problem: First of hopefully this is not a duplicate, but I could not find the right answer(right away). I would like to validate that an URI(http) is valid in Java. I came up with the following tests but I can't get them to pass. First I used getPort(), but then http://www… >>> More
TFS 2010 SDK: Connecting to TFS 2010 Programmatically–Part 1

as seen on Geeks with Blogs - Search for 'Geeks with Blogs'
Technorati Tags: Team Foundation Server 2010,TFS 2010 SDK,TFS API,TFS Programming,TFS ALM Download Working Demo Great! You have reached that point where you would like to extend TFS 2010. The first step is to connect to TFS programmatically. 1. Download TFS 2010 SDK => http://visualstudiogallery… >>> More
System.Uri can't parse when password field contains a "#"

as seen on Stack Overflow - Search for 'Stack Overflow'
The following code throws System.UriFormatException: var uri = new UriBuilder("ftp://user:pass#[email protected]:21/fu/bar.zip"); System.UriFormatException: Invalid URI: A port was expected because of there is a colon (':') present but the port could not be parsed. Removing the # symbol from… >>> More
Invalid URI: The Uri scheme is too long

as seen on Stack Overflow - Search for 'Stack Overflow'
Hi, I have XML: Which is result of this part of query: SELECT Countries.FileSystemName as country ,Regions.DefaultName as region ,Provinces.DefaultName as province,cities.defaultname as city,cities.code as cityCode, IndividualFlagsWithForObjects.value as Status I have xslt: <xsl:stylesheet… >>> More