Rest Standard: Path parameters or Request parameters

Question

I am creating a new REST service.

What is the standard for passing parameters to REST services. From different REST implementations in Java, you can configure param

Answer 1

This is a great fundamental question. I've recently come to the conclusion to stay away from using path parameters. They lead to ambiguous resource resolution. The URL is a basically the 'method name' of a piece of code running somewhere on a server. I prefer not to mix variable names with method names. The name of your method is apparently 'customer' (which IMHO is a rotten name for a method but REST folks love this pattern). The parameter you're passing to this method is the name of the customer. A query parameter works well for that, and this resource and query-parameter value can even be cached if desired.

There is no physical IT customer resource. There is likely no file on disk under a customer folder that's named after the customer. This is a web-service that performs some kind of database transaction. The 'resource' is your service, not the customer.

This obsession over REST and web-verbs reminds me of the early days of Object Oriented programming where we attempted to cram our code into virtual representations of physical objects. Then we realized that objects are usually virtual concepts in a system. OO is still useful when done the right way. REST is also useful if you realize that RESTful resources are services, not objects.