YAPRI: Yet another pseudo RESTful Interface

Amazons SimpleDB web service was just announced today.

SimpleDB is another instance of someone getting REST oh so incredibly wrong. Case in point:

From their documentation:

Amazon SimpleDB REST calls are made using HTTP GET requests

Yea that makes alot of sense since everyone knows you only ever need to READ from databases, never WRITE. Der.

It gets better. The following is a GET request to PUT information into the DB:

https://sdb.amazonaws.com/?Action=PutAttributes
  &DomainName=MyDomain
  &ItemName=Item123
  &Attribute.1.Name=Color&Attribute.1.Value=Blue
  &Attribute.2.Name=Size&Attribute.2.Value=Med
  &Attribute.3.Name=Price&Attribute.3.Value=14.99
  &AWSAccessKeyId=<valid_access_key>
  &Version=2007-11-07
  &Signature=Dqlp3Sd6ljTUA9Uf6SGtEExwUQE=
  &SignatureVersion=1
  &Timestamp=2007-06-25T15%3A01%3A28-07%3A00

Here is the response:

<PutAttributesResponse xmlns="http://sdb.amazonaws.com/doc/2007-11-07">
    <ResponseMetadata>
      <StatusCode>Success</StatusCode>
      <RequestId>f6820318-9658-4a9d-89f8-b067c90904fc</RequestId>
      <BoxUsage>0.0000219907</BoxUsage>
    </ResponseMetadata>
  </PutAttributesResponse>

They even use RESTful terms to explain the unRESTful implementation. Arg!

On this page alone they use REST 17 times! Please, someone get these developers a copy of RESTful Web Services so they won’t make a fool out of themselves any longer.