Hi Roger,

I'm not sure that there is sufficient disagreement here to warrant "camps"
in this discussion, but as usual, you've done a great job summarizing the
salient points.

I can't speak for others, but your points accurately reflected my general
thinking. I espcially liked the www.my-home.org examples as an application
where action verbs are a much more natural way of modeling the system.

Regarding the parts-depot purchase example, I think having a URL that would
model the "add-to-cart" action is fine. You can simply make it a POST to
preserve the no-side-effect condition for GET (maybe GET of that URL will
return the part availability?). In fact, a POST could provide an added
opportunity to ask for additional authentication.

I think having the action return a set of URLs that provides follow-on
actions would be even more interesting. For example, you could have the
add-to-cart action return URLs that allows you to remove from cart or go to
checkout.

Implementing a client-side shopping cart is certainly reasonable, but
website have server-side shopping carts because they want to track customers
as they actually add things to the carts even if they don't buy. It allows
them to remind the shopper and also gather more customer behavior info.

Again, your pragmatic examples are very useful illustrations of the issues.

Thanks!

//Joe

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