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I am developing a media server, the basic functionality is to serve an image, which is done the following way

/media/:id

where :id is the id of the image.

You may want to ask for a specific size, with some rules I will provide.

Eg:

/media/:id/50x50
/media/:id?witdh=50&height=50

Question: Which option do you think is better? I believe the second one to be more RESTful and beautiful, but we will be using a CDN and varnish for cache, so if we get

/media/:id?width=50&height=50

or

/media/:id?height=50&width=50

we will have 2 hits when we should have 1

Any advice?

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Sounds to me like you can see the exact risk you take if you go with query string parameters, rather than a fixed path component. Now the question is, is that risk acceptable, or too high? –  Sean McMillan Jul 16 '14 at 15:20
    
Using the query parameters suggests to me that ?height=49&width=51 would also be valid. The 50x50 path segment doesn't give this suggestion. How free are your users in choosing image size? –  Bart van Ingen Schenau Jul 16 '14 at 15:55
    
@BartvanIngenSchenau they can choose whatever size they want in any of the 2 ways –  amarseillan Jul 17 '14 at 16:46
    
@SeanMcMillan yep, wanted to see if someone had a solution because the correct way IMO is query string, maybe sorting the query string parameters in akamai and varnish –  amarseillan Jul 17 '14 at 16:47

1 Answer 1

up vote 1 down vote

According to URI standard the path should contain the hierarchical components and the query should contain the non-hierarchical components of the URI. But it can be subjective what is hierarchical and what non-hierarchical.

By developing a REST client these URLs mean nothing, because they follow hyperlinks and check link relations or other additional meta-data. (aka uniform interface / HATEOAS constraint)

If you cannot cache one of them, then you should choose the other one. Note: you always have to send cache headers. (aka cache constraint)

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