best approach to design a rest web service with binary data to be consumed from the browser

Question

I\'m developing a json rest web service that will be consumed from a single web page app built with backbone.js

This API will let the consumer upload files related t

Answer 1

I believe the ultimate method is number 3 (separate resource) for the main reason that it allows maximizing the value I get from the HTTP standard, which matches how I think of REST APIs. For example, and assuming a well-grounded HTTP client is in the use, you get the following benefits:

• Content compression: You optimize by allowing servers to respond with compressed result if clients indicate they support, your API is unchanged, existing clients continue to work, future clients can make use of it
• Caching: If-Modified-Since, ETag, etc. Clients can advoid refetching the binary data altogether
• Content type abstraction: For example, you require an uploaded image, it can be of types image/jpeg or image/png. The HTTP headers Accept and Content-type give us some elegant semantics for negotiating this between clients and servers without having to hardcode it all as part of our schema and/or API

On the other hand, I believe it's fair to conclude that this method is not the simplest if the binary data in question is not optional. In which case the Cons listed in Eric Hu's answer will come into play.