I have not read Roy Fielding's dissertation, and so I am speaking out of partial ignorance. But isn't most of this the opposite of what REST is supposed to be? URLs aren't supposed to represent resources? Whahh?
The contents of URL strings are not supposed to represent resources -- If a client of your "REST API" needs to concatenate strings together to form new URLs based on an out-of-band 'specification', YOU'RE DOING IT WRONG
Repeat after me: Hypertext. Is. The. Engine. Of. Application. State.
URL strings should be completely opaque -- you should be finding link to new resources in other resources, not constructing them yourself (query strings added to found resources are permitted).
The whole "meaningful URL" thing is a strong signal of False REST, and it infects the Rails ecosystem pervasively. REST has nothing to do with your oh-so-clever request routing rules.
One can build a service that has so-called "Rails-style meaningful URIs" that also returns hyperlinks to new resources. They aren't mutually exclusive.
That said, yes, everyone seems to forget about hypertext. I'm curious: if I'm building a REST-based JSON-formatted service, what's the convention for returning related URIs? Ex: if I return a Product resource andi want to have links to the products image, the owner's resource, edit this product, and so on, is there a standard way to return them in the JSON structure, or doesthis nor matter?
Can you explain more? It seems like you're saying that RESTful APIs should somehow be self-documenting, and that there should be no need for an API specification. I've never heard this argument before and would love to know more.
That is not exactly what was said. The idea is that URLs are not the same as resources, and that similar URLs do not necessarily imply a relationship between two resources.
