Article:		How to Create a REST Protocol
Subject:		Comments
Date:		2004-12-02 07:40:22
From:		Mark Baker
Nice Joe, but I disagree that #s 3 and 4 are part of the protocol; they just be work that needs to be done for the implementation of the service. Doing either of those in the protocol risks creating profiles of HTTP where clients only, for example, understand certain response code rather than those of HTTP itself. Consider a service which only ever returns 201; a client may be tempted never to check for 200, and would therefore barf if the service happened to use it in the future. That's why it's important to understand the fallback rules, i.e. that 2xx means "Success" even if you don't recognize the "xx" part.

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  2004-12-03 04:52:51 jgregorio [Reply]
  
  Mark,
  That is an excellent point. I added step 4 not to say that you are *only* going to support those status codes, but to highlight the fact that when putting together a web service you need to think about the HTTP status codes up front. In the future I'll always try to remember to mention fallback handling.