REST API's

Rough notes on the topic. I'll organize it later.

Caching

Bulk Operations

This is something that's possible, but probably not really RESTful. When fetching, say, forty different resources by ID, it's tempting to create a call like:

.../noun?ids=[1, 2, 3, ... 40]

instead of calling

.../noun/1
.../noun/2
.../noun/3
⋮
.../noun/40

However, that's not quite right. Fetching multiple is probably easier on the database, but it muddies the water. Caching (via HTTP) can no longer be done on a single resource. The internal code becomes mired with conditionals.

And yet, people seem to do this. Stack Overflow uses this method here. Plenty of resources exist for implementing "REST pagination". Very little seems to exist to describe the relation of such practices to REST best practices.