This REST business is very confusing. Well, it is confusing becuase of the debate of what is really REST and what is not. In the true sense I mean.
I tend to refer to the recommendation system’s external interface as REST although I’m not sure it really lives up to the standards set out by Fielding. REST dictates that the HTML request should be as readable as possible. Furthermore, GET implies the request is side-effect free and can thus be cached. Fielding’s blog post on the POST/PUT argument explains why. As far as I can tell from his other blog post REST APIs must be hypertext-driven I think I’m on the right track.
Querying the following today:
http://service.domain.com/api/users/<id>/recommendations?factors=<list of numbers>&quantity=<int>
will simply yield:
{
"recommendations" : [[Item, Relevance], [Item, Relevance], ... ]
"itemset" : Id
}
Nothing more nothing less. Can this be called REST or is it simply a HTTP GET request with a response in a JSON format?