How should I deal with object hierarchies in a RESTful API?

Question

I am currently designing the API for an existing PHP application, and to this end am investigating REST as a sensible architectural approach.

I believe I have a reas

Answer 1

I would recommend Restful Obects which is standards for exposing domain model's restful

The idea of Restful Objects is to provide a standard, generic RESTful interface for domain object models, exposing representations of their structure using JSON and enabling interactions with domain object instances using HTTP GET, POST, PUT and DELETE.

According to the standard, the URIs will be like:

• api.example.com/object/user/31
• api.example.com/object/user/31/properties/username
• api.example.com/object/user/31/collections/channels
• api.example.com/object/user/31/collections/members
• api.example.com/object/user/31/actions/someFunction
• api.example.com/object/user/31/actions/someFunction/invoke

There are also other resources

• api.example.com/services
• api.example.com/domain-types

The specification defines a few primary representations:

• object (which represents any domain object or service)
• list (of links to other objects)
• property
• collection
• action
• action result (typically containing either an object or a list, or just feedback messages)
• and also a small number of secondary representations such as home, and user

This is interesting as you’ll see that representations are fully self-describing, opening up the possibility of generic viewers to be implemented if required.

Alternatively, the representations can be consumed directly by a bespoke application.