Implementing a RESTful API resource

Question

Every resource online I have been able to find on the subject of restful api uri only covers standards and practices. But how does one develop a restful uri? This entire time I have developed web pages with extensions. How does one make a page without extensions? I am very confused.

Answer 1

Restful APIs are generally served by URL rewriting or forwarding; the 'pages' are not exactly pages but requests to a service. So something like this:

 myco.com/people/jonny/house

Would be the resource for Jonny's house. But there is no page as such, just a service that sees that and either directly calls requestPerson('jonny').house or perhaps rewrites it as a page request that can be fulfilled.

Try to see it less as a file location and more as a request string, so it is more like myco.com/people , which is being asked for 'jonny/house' .

The two things to do when developing a RESTful interface are to decide on your data structure and decide on your request structure/mapping. So you have people and cars, and you permit requests for people, cars, or both. To some degree it is like querying a database via stored procedures; the procedures have to be set up to respond to queries, and they will do so in a predictable manner. The difference is that there is an engine managing the requests and responses, and the responses are generally in html format (though they can be JSON, XML, etc).