REST Best Practices (Deep Workflow)

REST is HTTP semantics used consistently: resources as nouns, methods with meaning, predictable errors, and cacheable reads where safe.

When to Offer This Workflow

Trigger conditions:

• Designing public or partner HTTP APIs
• Inconsistent verbs (GET with side effects); wrong status codes
• CDN/caching surprises; client retry storms on POST

Initial offer:

Use six stages: (1) resource model, (2) methods & safety, (3) status & errors, (4) pagination & filtering, (5) caching & conditional requests, (6) versioning & evolution). Confirm JSON conventions and authentication model.

Stage 1: Resource Model