Continuing to explore REST...
Lesson: REST is not about building nice little web applications like blogs, or Amazon, or Google. REST is about building web scale applications like...
the Web.
Lesson: the Web is already web scale. If you are building your application on the back of HTTP, all you need to do is not screw it up...
for example, by replacing text/html with some other media type that doesn't include controls. Oops.
Lesson: a friend of mine teaches his students that, when they are asked to implement a protocol, their first step should be to obtain the appropriate state machine compiler. In reverse, if an expert writes a thesis on Representational STATE Transfer, you should be thinking about how that maps to your application protocols...
and maybe not so much mapping it to your data model. Or your persistence layer.
Lesson: HTML is a perfectly cromulent media-type. GET and POST will serve as hypermedia controls. application/www-form-urlencoded is a little bit clumsy for hierarchical data, but can be made to serve.
So it should be straight forward to use a browser to navigate your application protocol?
Lesson: the modern web works. You point your browser at a url, and the browser downloads a bunch of java script that renders a single page application, and starts pinging some json api and using the responses to update the DOM.... That's REST. Event if those json endpoints aren't actually providing hypermedia controls - neither do images in html documents.
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