Side Channel

Just to document my thought before going to bed tonight. I've try to implement RESTful web application after get hooked with web.py few years ago. It end up with frustration. The REST concept is just ideal and I can't really say how much I like it. I'd even wrote a simple PHP dispatcher for that but the problem is the browser which only implement 2 HTTP methods for you to get around the application.

It's either POST or GET, unless you make the request through some XMLHTTP request (ajax ...).

Ideally, in a fully RESTful application:-

GET /customers

would return a list of customers.

POST /customer

would add the new resource customer and return the identifier or location of the new resource.

PUT /customer/20

would modify customer resource with ID 20.

DELETE /customer/20

would delete customer resource with ID 20.

With limitation of the browser, implementation is not that easy. You can't directly DELETE a resource since there's no way the browser can issue that request. Most of the workaround I saw is to create another resource, some kind of Deleter resource so you can POST to that (another workaround) to delete the resource. You end up having something like:-

class Customer {
    function GET($resource_id = Null) {

    }

    function POST() {
        // add new customer
    }
}

class CustomerUpdater {
    function GET($id) {
        // display the edit form
    }

    function POST($id) {
        // modify the customer
    }
}

class CustomerDeleter {
    function GET($id) {
        // display the confirmation form
    }

    function POST($id) {
        // delete the customer
    }
}

Instead of:-

class Customer {
    function GET($resource_id = Null) {

    }

    function POST() {
        // add new customer
    }

    function PUT($id) {
        // modify customer
    }

    function DELETE($id) {
        // delete customer
    }
}

We start to see how it getting ugly. There's maybe other workaround but what I can say, when you start doing all these things it's not RESTful anymore.

There another PHP project called tonic that try to implement a RESTful framework but I guess the development is now stalled. Pronto also trying doing the same though not really RESTful.