REST Abuse
Public APIs for mapping services are common. Lately, the trend seems to be to call these APIs “RESTful”, because REST (REpresentational State Transfer) has become a bit of a buzzword. However, I’ve yet to see one that actually follows REST principles.
REST is an architectural style. REST is not a toolkit, a push button option in your Integrated Development Environment (IDE), or an API. In fact, if you see parameter name like operation (op), action (actn), or request in the URI query string it is usually an indicator that the REST style is not being used.
You have to consciously build your applications to follow REST principles. Resources, resource collections, links, content types, and state transfer are key ingredients. Paul James does a great job of explaining the issues.
Most mapping services are just HTTP GET requests that return an image. They are “Web-style” and Web friendly. They are useful. But, they are not REST, and calling them such is misleading.
[tags]rest, web-style, map service[/tags]