[mapguide-internals] RESTful Ramblings of a Restless Lunatic

[Paul Spencer]

I haven't had time to read this in detail, nor do I understand how to  
craft RESTful interfaces yet.  I have a specific question about  
enumeration, please feel free to tell me I don't know what the hell  
I'm talking about :)

1) I don't understand how the url gets built with parameters in a  
RESTful approach, can you provide an example of what the url would  
look like?

2) Is it RESTful to craft the numerate resources as follows:

GET /Library/

returns all resources at all depths below /Library

GET /Libary/n

returns the content n levels deep

GET /Libary/FeatureSource
GET /Library/FeatureSource/n ... or GET /Library/n/FeatureSource

returns only feature sources?

Um, if the above is useful then how do we request the enumeration to  
come back in .xml, .json etc?  By just appending /<content type> to  
the end?

Next question:  Is it possible to have two different resource types  
with the same name in the same folder?  IE

/Library/Parks.FeatureSource
/Library/Parks.LayerDefinition

If not, then what would the impact be of changing the various calls  
to drop the type specifier?

Cheers

Paul

On 3-Oct-07, at 3:55 PM, Robert Bray wrote:

> All,
>
> I left FOSS4G last week somewhat pumped after seeing the talk Haris  
> gave demonstrating his RESTful Web Service client. So I went out  
> this weekend  purchased the O'Reilly RESTful Web Services book and  
> read it mostly from cover to cover. That of course left me  
> pondering what a RESTful interface to MapGuide should look like, so  
> I spent a couple of hours hacking the following (still incomplete)  
> proposal together:
>
> http://trac.osgeo.org/mapguide/wiki/RESTfulWebServices
>
> I approached this somewhat differently than Haris did, at this  
> point it is up to you to decide whether that is bad or good.  
> However I think my approach is pretty clean while exposing all of  
> the capabilities of MapGuide in a RESTful manner.
>
> Feel free to either discuss this here on the list or add your  
> comments to the Wiki page (or both).
>
> Bob
> _______________________________________________
> mapguide-internals mailing list
> mapguide-internals at lists.osgeo.org
> http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/mapguide-internals

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|Paul Spencer                          pspencer at dmsolutions.ca    |
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|Chief Technology Officer                                         |
|DM Solutions Group Inc                http://www.dmsolutions.ca/ |
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