[rest-practices] Namespace qualifying respresentation types

Eoghan Glynn eoghan.glynn at gmail.com
Thu Apr 29 10:55:07 UTC 2010


Folks,

I wanted to get the group's feeling for the use of namespaces in
representation types.

The context for the question initially comes from a discussion about how
action/operations were to be modelled in RHEVM-API, particularly how to
capture the action-specific parameter types in the schema. In XML schema
terms, my first cut was to use an xs:any within the action element, but to
restrict the contained type to the local namespace. Which of course requires
that a target namespace is defined in the first place.

So I'm sensing there may be some opposition to this, given that namespacing
isn't widely used in the existing RESTful APIs. I guess I'm wondering
whether this ommission was a concious decision, or just that nobody saw the
need for using namespaces but wouldn't be averse to their use in principle.

Obviously there are other RESTful examples out there in the wild where the
xmlns attribute makes an appearance, Atom springs to mind here ... <feed
xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom">. And I don't need to rehearse the basic
advantages of using namespaces, partitioning the global namespace, aiding in
validation, encoding version information etc. But I would be interested in
hearing if there's determined opposition to their use, and if so what the
reasoning is.

Thanks,
Eoghan
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