http://ayende.comAyende @ RahienCopyright (C) Ayende Rahien 2004 - 2021 (c) 202660Although nice in concept, i find that pure REST-driven UI navigation too limitting to be useful in practice. For a start, there is already a very well established implementation of this very idea of using documents to drive navigation, complete with the capability to embed rich UI logic and layouting (in addition to primitive transitional links), all fully driven by server responses. And they named this implementation HTML. The UI engine that inteprets this RESTful messages is called web-engine. Reimplementing REST-driven UI is getting really close to reinventing the HTML. I find that driving your client navigation with REST with the absence of HTML/css/js capability usuallly poses a very restricting limitation in building a rich interactive UI (while also reduces chatiness), and i therefore abandoned this approach. In your example, for instance, how do you embed the logic of enabling your link buttons based on certain client-side conditions, purely using REST. Do u have any trick how you tackle this issue?http://ayende.com/155009/rest-and-urls#comment9http://ayende.com/155009/rest-and-urls#comment9Thu, 08 Mar 2012 10:35:29 GMTWould be nice if you can write blog post explainig your vision of REST and some small examples. Thanks.http://ayende.com/155009/rest-and-urls#comment8http://ayende.com/155009/rest-and-urls#comment8Wed, 07 Mar 2012 04:56:29 GMTAnd if you notice, the RavenDB service is callED "HTTP API", and NOT "REST API". http://ayende.com/155009/rest-and-urls#comment7http://ayende.com/155009/rest-and-urls#comment7Mon, 05 Mar 2012 20:45:16 GMTRob himself posted a very interesting reply -- http://devlicio.us/blogs/rob_eisenberg/archive/2012/03/05/alt-tekpub-rest.aspxhttp://ayende.com/155009/rest-and-urls#comment6http://ayende.com/155009/rest-and-urls#comment6Mon, 05 Mar 2012 13:25:43 GMTCompletely agree. I wrote a blog post recently about Rob's statement as the result of a twitter debate. I also wrote two posts on Fielding's ReST, http://curtis.schlak.com/2012/01/19/fieldings-rest.html and http://curtis.schlak.com/2012/01/23/hateoas-a-follow-up-to-rest-for-r33lz.html. Hope they help with others' understanding.http://ayende.com/155009/rest-and-urls#comment5http://ayende.com/155009/rest-and-urls#comment5Mon, 05 Mar 2012 12:05:37 GMTI have read lately a nice book about it: Thomas Erl – SOA Design Patterns. He basically distinguishes between Resourceful APIs and REST. I think pretty URLs is part of Resourceful APIs where REST is much more such as using the correct verbs for CRUD, etc.http://ayende.com/155009/rest-and-urls#comment4http://ayende.com/155009/rest-and-urls#comment4Mon, 05 Mar 2012 10:34:09 GMTI have read lately a nice book about it: Thomas Erl – SOA Design Patterns. He basically distinguishes between Resourceful APIs and REST. I think pretty URLs is part of Resourceful APIs where REST is much more such as using the correct verbs for CRUD, etc.http://ayende.com/155009/rest-and-urls#comment3http://ayende.com/155009/rest-and-urls#comment3Mon, 05 Mar 2012 10:33:28 GMTIt is nice to see the Eisenberg Effect propagating over HTTP too.http://ayende.com/155009/rest-and-urls#comment2http://ayende.com/155009/rest-and-urls#comment2Mon, 05 Mar 2012 09:02:13 GMTNice to see this post in your blog especially after the 'limit your abstractions' series. I would also add (or restate you) that the presence of links in responses allows to move the workflow logic from being both on client and server to server only.http://ayende.com/155009/rest-and-urls#comment1http://ayende.com/155009/rest-and-urls#comment1Mon, 05 Mar 2012 08:26:53 GMT