Give it a REST

As you might know, I’m currently looking for a job. And one thing you see in job ads is a requirement for experience with “REST APIs” or “RESTful services”. And as far as I can tell, it’s nothing more than a naming convention for your basic CRUD (Create, Read, Update, Delete) web services. If you write four URL handlers for the URLs “/item/create”, “/item/{item id}/read”, “/item/{item id}/update” and “/item/{item id}/delete” then you’re a filthy normie and unemployable, but if instead you make one URL handler for “/item/{item id}” and check the request type and do the read, update and delete based on the request type being “GET”, “PUT”, or “DELETE” respectively, (creation being done with a POST to the URL “/items”) then you’re a “RESTful” guru and will be showered in money.

Can we just agree that being a naming convention, it takes approximately 5 minutes to train somebody how to do this? And if my former employer would give me back my login for an hour or so I could go back and change all my AJAX calls to fit this naming convention and join the ranks of the REST API experienced.