A Description Format for REST
Sunday, 7 December 2003
Adam asks if there’s a description format for REST. I don’t know of any that have wide acceptance (and I think the hard-core RESTafarians will answer “REST is self-describing, that’s the point” ;) but I have been noodling on something for my own purposes.
So far, I have a sample XML file that describes the RESTLog API (with some modifications to make it more interesting), as well as a stylesheet to do code generation for Tarawa (which is also still in progress).
Comments / suggestions welcome. I’m particularly interested to see if it’s adequate to describe other kinds of REST-based APIs (including everyday Web sites), whatever they may be. It explicitly isn’t designed to describe every possible URI-based API, but rather a reasonable and well-behaving subset. In other words, it’s intended to encourage good URI design, rather than the current state of the Web.
I’m also working on a spec, as well as a stylesheet to HTML.
P.S. - this has actually been sitting on my machine for a few months; it was always “not quite done yet, need to spiffy it up a bit more.” I need to get it through my head that it’s just better to throw it over the fence sometimes, and see what happens.