[rest-practices] Read-only fields in a representation type

[Bryan Kearney]

On 04/23/2010 08:30 AM, Mark Little wrote:
> The debate as to whether or not to use WADL isn't tied to HATEOS, which
> as you know is only one aspect of REST: the reasons not to use it go
> much deeper than that. I assume you've checked out various resources
> like ...

Well.. that is the common refrain. If you are describing the URLs, you 
_must_ not be using the links, and therefore you are too tightly coupled 
to the server.

I find it interesting that the on ramp to rest is "it is simpler", which 
it is when you go the bookmark approach, and send http requests to known 
resource locations. If I was asked to write a client against 
"ThatKoolRestAPI" then either:

1) The developers had better documented every resource, and every action 
link which is possible from each link

or

2) I have to execute each path manually (or with loggin) to see what I 
can do next.

Since I tend not to trust developers to always update the documentation, 
it seems like an automated means to do (1) would be valuable to the API 
writers as well as documenters. Note, I am not advocation IDL driven 
development. Develop the code, generate the IDL.


>
> http://www.25hoursaday.com/weblog/2007/06/04/WhatsWrongWithWADL.aspx
> http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1312087/what-is-the-reason-for-using-wadl
>
> http://www.markbaker.ca/blog/2007/05/rest-wadl-forest-trees/comment-page-1/
> http://www.innoq.com/blog/st/2007/06/wadl_just_a_hypermedia_format.html
> http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2007/05/28/REST
> http://www.mnot.net/blog/2008/01/21/wadl_watching
> http://www.infoq.com/news/2007/03/WADL

Some of the these are against it, but much of the haters are in the 
comments. The best valuable comments are from the fist link which talk 
about the issues of using XSD as the means to validate. I think these 
are valid. I would rather see the discussion be around how to make a 
good descriptor syntax, but it seems to be focused on "why would you 
ever want to describe your API?"

-- bk