[rest-practices] rest-practices purpose

[Perry Myers]

On 04/14/2010 02:31 PM, Perry Myers wrote:
> I was asked to create and moderate this list with the following purpose in
> mind...
> 
> We've got a lot of components in use across Red Hat and the upstream
> communities that utilize interfaces like QMF and REST.  It would be a good
> thing to have all of the different communities that are producing APIs
> communicate together to make sure that these API definitions are
> consistent in both style and usage.
> 
> This mailing list will focus specifically on best practices for using
> REST, since we will be providing either native REST interfaces for many of
> our APIs or layering REST on top of other interfaces like QMF.
> 
> One other side project is to create a generic QMF<->REST binding in Ruby.
>  Bob M. and Ted R. are leading this and can comment further.
> 
> Welcome to the list, and if you feel there are others that should
> participate please feel free to invite them.  This is an open and external
> forum, as we want community observation and involvement as we develop
> externally consumable APIs using REST.
> 
> To start with, it might be useful for the existing folks on list that are
> already creating (have created) REST APIs to provide a little background
> context about their specific APIs and links to documentation on them.

So far, very productive discussions I think.  It's good to have all the
experts collaborating in one place :)

One thing that I wanted to mention that falls into what the purpose of
this list is...

For cloud related efforts, we want to make sure that all of our usages of
REST are consistent wrt style/best practices.  Ideally, it would be best
if all Red Hat REST usage is on the same page.  But barring that, the
cloud usage should at least be consistent.

So bburke's REST pages are certainly a good starting poing wrt
style/usage.  But Mark M. will also be maintaining a separate wiki page
(he'll provide the link) that is specific to cloud usage of REST.
Hopefully it won't duplicate all of the good work that bburke has done,
but instead will just point out style differences between his pages and
what cloud folks agree on.

It will be expected that all cloud developers will conform to the style as
agreed upon in Mark's wiki page.

Thanks,

Perry