No, I didn't define what I meant with "REST" elsewhere. I really had only two goals when starting this:
- Make "pretty" url's
- Have separate handlers for the HTTP verbs or methods
The fact that I'm having trouble accomplishing #1 (i.e., unable to hack mod_rewrite sufficiently that index.pl is hidden, or even that it depends on mod_rewrite) is frustrating but minor. From the reading I've done on REST, handling the HTTP verbs differently is pretty important, and I think this approach does it pretty well.
On the value of "pretty" url's, I've recently been thinking that having a url-mapping for functionality within a web application is a useful tool to organize the application.
The biggest drawback I see with my implementation is the extra code you'd have to write (as opposed to "configure" in the url-mapping) to differentiate content-types, e.g.:
# somewhere in a Renderer subclass...
sub POST {
my $self = shift;
my $filename = $self->cgi->param('file');
my $type = $self->cgi->uploadInfo($filename)->{'Content-Type'};
if ( $type eq 'text/html' ) {
# do something with the HTML
}
elsif ( $type eq 'image/gif' ) {
# do something with the GIF
}
# ...
}
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