REST URIs and operations on an object that can be commented on, tagged, rated, etc

Question

I\'m doing research into a web API for my company, and it\'s starting to look like we might implement a RESTful one. I\'ve read a couple of books about this now (O\'Reilly\'s \"

Answer 1

@Nelson LaQuet:

Using the HTTP methods as they are actually defined gives you the safety of knowing that executing a GET on anything on a web site or service won't eat your data or otherwise mangle it. As an example (pointed out in RESTful Web Services) Google's Web Accelerator expects this behaviour -- as stated in the FAQ -- and presumably other services do too.

Also it gets you idempotency for free. That is doing a GET, DELETE, HEAD or PUT on a resource more than once is the same as doing it only once. Thus if your request fails then all you have to do is run it again.