[aerogear-dev] Server Contracts and Thoughts about Server-Agnostic Clients

Howdy! I was thinking on how to start this conversation on server contracts, so let's start with an example for a resource named "car" - all interactions are 'application/json'. We talked on irc about how to maintain the bare minimum that would give us full agnostic server backends, and I've tried to limit as CRUDL - CRUD + List without pagination :) C POST /cars R GET /car/1 U PUT /car/1 D DELETE /car/1 L GET /cars Glen commented on irc that this would introduce coupling between the client and the server - but the point is that the endpoint style can and should be configurable in several levels: - always_plural? (/cars everywhere) [1] - do we support batch operations? (as suggested by [1]) - logic name (/vehicles should be interpreted as "cars") - read-only routes? The point is, we can and should adapt to the most common scenarios - so an user should be able to use /signup instead of /register for auth endpoints - and there's what is a must for us IMO. The user is using a <insert your technology here> server? if he supports http sessions we should be able to authenticate him, and here is where our challenge lies - being "inclusive" without making our APIs lame :) So, we need to figure out what is more common, and make this the default (or convention), while still allowing our users to choose different/weird conventions for their endpoints. Thoughts? (Before I forgot, Glen asked about pagination too, and I think this should be layered on top of this basics, as in this case there is no standard way to do it) [1]: http://blog.apigee.com/detail/restful_api_design_nouns_are_good_verbs_are... -- qmx