Hands-On RESTful API Design Patterns and Best Practices

Identification of resources

As we have seen in earlier sections, a resource represents a named entity in a web application, and it is usually a Uniform Resource Locator (URL). So, an entity can be identified and assigned as a resource by an explicit reference to it.

A URL in a web application is usually a link, and it is in fact a URI. For example, a home page URI, https://developer.twitter.com, uniquely identifies the concept of a specific website's root resource. In REST constraints, the URIs we use are described as follows:

• The semantics of the mapping of the URI to a resource must not change. For instance, Twitter's https://api.twitter.com/1.1/statuses/retweets/:id.json as a URI may never change, and of course the contents or values ...