Simon Willison’s Weblog

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Friday, 15th August 2008

If it's easy to make all your calls conform to the RESTful verb architecture, then that's good, I guess. But if not, then just use a POST as an RPC call, keep it as simple as possible and be done with it. And don't spend another minute worrying about being RESTful or not.

Damien Katz

# 8:07 am / damien-katz, http, post, rest, restful, rpc, web-services

REST, I just don’t get it. Read the comments for some excellent practical reasons to care about REST, including cache management (PUT and DELETE can expire the cache entries for the corresponding GET), the ability to add or move parts of the server API without redeploying client libraries and the idempotency of GET / PUT / DELETE and HEAD (repeated POST operations may have side-effects).

# 8:20 am / caching, damien-katz, delete, get, idempotency, post, put, rest

minidetector. Neat piece of Django middleware that adds a “mobile = True” attribute to the request object if the request’s user-agent matches a list of strings of known low-power browsers in mobiles, PDAs or game consoles.

# 8:21 am / django, middleware, minidetector, mobile, python