Should I separate RESTful API controllers from "regular" controllers?

Posted by keithjgrant on Stack Overflow See other posts from Stack Overflow or by keithjgrant
Published on 2010-04-23T00:06:50Z Indexed on 2010/04/23 0:13 UTC
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rest

This seems like an elementary question, but after a lot of searching around I can't seem to find a straightforward explanation:

If I'm building a web application that is going to be accessed largely through a web browser, but that will also support some API requests in a RESTful way, should there be a large degree of separation between the two?

On one hand, it seems a large amount of the functionality is the same, with identical data presented in different views (HTML vs. XML/JSON). But on the other hand, there are certain things I need to present to the browser that doesn't quite fit a RESTful approach: how to get an empty form to create a new instance of a resource and how to get a pre-populated form to edit an existing resource.

Should these two different methods of accessing the system by funneled through different controllers? Different methods in the same controller? The exact same methods with a switch for view type?

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