General principles for good URI design for RESTful and HTTP applications

"(Note: I did not say "RESTful URI design"; URIs are essentially opaque in REST.)"<p>Glad to see that - I'm seriously puzzled by the number of references I see to "RESTful URIs".

All this is nice and well, but how would one build an "unsubscribe" link into a newsletter system without a GET request changing the state of the resource (i.e. deleting the email address from the active recipients table by just clicking a link)?<p>Would this be the exception to the rule or is this problem totally unrelated to REST?<p>BTW: I'm not debating, I really wanna know.

<i>"Don't use query parameters to alter state" "Don't fall into RPC with your URIs"</i><p>I can see the benefit of doing some of the things on the list, but I never understood what's the motivation behind these two suggestions. What are the practical benefits? (Specifically, what are the benefits for a <i>web application</i>, rather than a web app?)<p>I can give you some <i>considerable</i> benefits of doing the opposite. My favorite URL scheme looks like this: "<a href="http://example.com/?Class.method.id.parts&#38;param=x" rel="nofollow">http://example.com/?Class.method.id.parts&#38;param=x</a>.<p>It enables automatic routing without the need to write explicit, case-by-case routing logic or .htaccess files. It doesn't mess up the base path, so I don't need to do some magic when writing URLs. Moreover, it's <i>straightforward</i>. It's easy to see what's going on on the web pages, in the code and in the logs, because knowing a URL means immediately knowing which controller and action are involved (which is not the case with clever resource-mapping schemes).

In this same vein, I am curious what you guys think of using semi-colon and comma characters in URLs when pointing at an endpoint that generates a response that would typically be provided by a query string, e.g.:<p><pre><code> http://site.com/generate;lang=en,size=32,weight=78 </code></pre> RESTful Web Services Cookbook[1] gave me the idea (a fantastic book) and what I like about it, is that interstitial proxy software seems to molest the URL less where as some refuse to pass through query string params for some reason (e.g. CloudFront).<p>Anyone see any glaring issues with this?<p>[1] <a href="http://www.amazon.com/RESTful-Web-Services-Cookbook-Scalability/dp/0596801688/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&#38;qid=1328307149&#38;sr=8-1" rel="nofollow">http://www.amazon.com/RESTful-Web-Services-Cookbook-Scalabil...</a>

My first thought was "maybe we should back up and emphasize that resources are nouns before going further", but if you scroll up you'll see that this was actually the original question asked (how do I avoid naming them with verbs?).

This article on how to design a RESTful API is really great: <a href="http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/webservices/library/ws-restful/" rel="nofollow">http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/webservices/library/ws-res...</a>

Holy shit, why hasn't this been around forever?<p>I forgot about 2?? responses other than 200, going to implement that now. Also going to implement 418 just because it's fun.