[rest-practices] Versioning

[Mark Little]

http://www.informit.com/articles/article.aspx?p=1566460


On 27 Apr 2010, at 21:19, Mark McLoughlin wrote:

> On Mon, 2010-04-26 at 10:43 -0400, Bob McWhirter wrote:
>> Isn't this where the other week's discussion on content-types,  
>> content
>> negotiation, and Accept: headers figure in?  The API and the model of
>> the resources is one-in-the-same, really, no?  The "API" is just a
>> root synthetic collection or object, sometimes, versionable like any
>> other model entity using content-type.
>
> Yes, yes and yes :)
>
> To be clear - I'm only talking here about incompatible versioning of
> incompatible revisions of the interface. I don't think we need  
> versions
> for compatible revisions. And we also should very, very rarely have
> incompatible revisions.
>
> My understanding of the previous discussion was that we were leaning
> towards not using media type versions for incompatible revisions e.g.
>
>  https://www.redhat.com/archives/rest-practices/2010-April/msg00008.html
>
>  What I've read is that a different URL scheme might be preferable for
>  clients that are not able to participate in HTTP content negotiation
>  (like a browser). If you're following the guideline of not exposing
>  your URL schemes and instead using links, then things actually become
>  simpler for the client as it doesn't have to set any Accept headers.
>
>  https://www.redhat.com/archives/rest-practices/2010-April/msg00017.html
>
>  But I tent to think that content negociation makes things way harder
>  (and fragile) than they should. A versioned URI space if you really  
> want
>  to decouple different version support is the simplest IMHO.
>
>
> Given that we're talking about (hopefully) very rare incompatible
> changes, I much prefer the simplicity of doing the versioning in the
> URIs.
>
> This is one of the reasons I wanted the style guide thing - so we  
> can be
> clear whether we're actually coming to agreement on things or not :-)
>
> Cheers,
> Mark.
>
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---
Mark Little
mlittle at redhat.com

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