Friday, December 5, 2008

Trac provides a good example of RESTful resources

The Trac issue tracking and wiki system provides a good example of a RESTful web resource. Good RESTful resources are connected. This means that the associations between resources are within the resource. If a given resource is associated with another resource, the second resource should be navigable from the first.

This is the basic concept behind links in hypermedia.

Trac, however takes this a step further with a trivial feature that is much more valuable than it may seem at first glance. Trac integrates very nicely with subversion. In a large percentage of cases, one ore more changesets are associated with a ticket. It is also fairly trivial to link to a changeset from within a ticket. Here is the interesting feature. The title attribute of the anchor that links to the changeset is the message associated with the changeset. Here is what I mean.



This subtle feature has saved me the time required to actually follow a link to view the changeset resource on numerous occasions. Most of the time, we're only interested in the message. Trac has realized this usability issue and addressed it.

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