Is RPC disguised as REST a bad idea?

Question

Our whole system is being designed around REST and are now considering how processes which are quite clearly RPC in intent can be mapped to RESTful resources without using verbs in the URL. Our remote procedure call is used to rebuild our search index when a content listing has been modified elsewhere.

What we are thinking about doing is this:

POST /index_updates

<indexUpdate><contentId>123</contentId></indexUpdate>

Nothing wrong with that in itself, but the smell is this resource which has been created does not return the URL of the newly created resource e.g. /index_updates/1234 which we can then access with a GET.

The indexing engine we are using does have a log mechanism, so in theory we could return a URL to a index_update resource so as to allow a GET to retrieve the resource, but to be honest we're not interested in the resource as this is nothing more than an RPC in disguise.

So my question is whether RESTfulness is expressed in structure or intent. I feel the structure of what I have outlined is restful, but the intent is not.

Does anyone have an comments or advice?

Thanks,

Chris

Answer 1

Use the right tool for the job. In this case, it definitely seems like the right tool is a pure remote procedure call, and there's no reason to pretend it's REST.