Non-CRUD operations in a RESTful service

Question

What is the \"RESTful\" way of adding non-CRUD operations to a RESTful service? Say I have a service that allows CRUD access to records like this:

GET /api/         


        

Answer 1

I feel REST APIs help in lot more ways than just providing semantics. So cannot choose RPC style just because of some calls that seem to make more sense in RPC operation style. Example is the google maps api to find directions between two places. Looks like this: http://maps.googleapis.com/maps/api/directions/json?origin=Jakkur&destination=Hebbal

They could have called it "findDirections" (verb) and treated it as an operation. Rather they made "direction" (noun) as a resource and treated finding directions as a query on the directions resource (Though internally there could be no real resource called direction and it could be implemented by business logic to find directions based on params).