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Which one of these URIs would be more 'fit' for receiving POSTs (adding product(s))? Are there any best practices available or is it just personal preference?
/product/ (singular)
or
/products/ (plural)
Currently we use /products/?query=blah for searching and /product/{productId}/ for GETs PUTs & DELETEs of a single product.
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It shouldn't matter whether it's plural or singular or anything else. You should respect the uri's sent from the server and not "build up" your uri's on the client. Then you have 0 mapping to do for your code. @richard The client still has to do mapping.
In general, using plural nouns is preferred unless the resource is clearly a singular concept (e.g. https://api.example.com/users/admin for the administrative user).
Resource identification through URI: A RESTful web service exposes a set of resources that identify the targets of the interaction with its clients. Resources are identified by URIs, which provide a global addressing space for resource and service discovery.
A RESTful web service request contains: An Endpoint URL. An application implementing a RESTful API will define one or more URL endpoints with a domain, port, path, and/or query string — for example, https://mydomain/user/123?format=json .
Since POST is an "append" operation, it might be more Englishy to POST to /products, as you'd be appending a new product to the existing list of products.
As long as you've standardized on something within your API, I think that's good enough.
Since REST APIs should be hypertext-driven, the URI is relatively inconsequential anyway. Clients should be pulling URIs from returned documents and using those in subsequent requests; typically applications and people aren't going to need to guess or visually interpret URIs, since the application will be explicitly instructing clients what resources and URIs are available.
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