[rest-practices] Modelling membership

[Bob McWhirter]

I guess I see the need for both.  I consider an href to be like a C++  
pointer to *something.  While that thing can certainly (and maybe  
absolutely should) have some other identifier.

I don't mean to claim that the href is the identifier.  It should be  
opaque, potentially ugly, but easily navigable.  ID is just another  
property, perhaps with uniqueness constraints.

	-Bob


On May 4, 2010, at 5:24 PM, Bill Burke wrote:

>
>
> Bob McWhirter wrote:
>>> So, by not having it toplevel, what we're thinking is equivalent to:
>>>
>>> POST /users/1234/memberships
>>>
>>> <membership>
>>>   <group id="4321"/>
>>> </membership>
>> Generally speaking, I'd rather see hrefs instead of IDs:
>>  <group href="${url_to_group}"/>
>
> Not sure I agree that hrefs are better.  You end up having to  
> extract the id from the URL somehow, someway, so that you can  
> associate the things within a relational database
>
> -- 
> Bill Burke
> JBoss, a division of Red Hat
> http://bill.burkecentral.com