2008 September 29 | Dimuthu's Blog

The REST API for Twitter is very simple to learn and implement. And it has a comprehensive documentation.

Here is some selected operations to just to show its design. Note that here userid should be replaced with a valid twitter user id or user name and the format should be changed to the required output format (.xml, json, rss, atom are possible output formats)

Operation	HTTP Verb	URL	Example HTTP Request (Setting username as ‘dimuthu’ and the output format as .xml)
Get public (all users) statuses	GET	http://twitter.com/statuses/public_timeline	GET http://twitter.com/statuses/public_timeline
Get a user statuses	GET	http://twitter.com/statuses/user_timeline/userid.format	GET http://twitter.com/statuses/user_timeline/dimuthu.xml
Get a particular status	GET	http://twitter.com/statuses/show/statusid.format	GET http://twitter.com/statuses/show/938135815.xml
Create a new status	POST	http://twitter.com/statuses/update.format	POST http://twitter.com/statuses/update.xml Authorization: Basic xxxx ……….. <status>my status message</status>
Delete a particular status	DELETE/ POST	http://twitter.com/statuses/destroy/statusid.xml	DELETE http://twitter.com/statuses/destroy/939390294.xml Authorization: Basic xxxx ………..

After having look at this API, the first question I had was whether this API is actually RESTful. In RESTful design we expect to map a resource to a URL and do CRUD (Create, Read, Update and Delete) operations using request with different Http Verbs (POST, GET, PUT, DELETE) with that same URL. Look at my blog on RESTful CRUD Data Services Demo for more clarification.

So if ever the API is designed following the above theory it would have been like this.

Operation	HTTP Request
Get all statuses	GET http://twitter.com/statuses.xml
Get a particular user statuses	GET http://twitter.com/users/{user_id}/statuses.xml
Get a particular statuses of a user	GET http://twitter.com/users/{user_id}/statuses/{status_id}.xml
Crete a particular statuses of a user	POST http://twitter.com/users/{user_id}/statuses.xml
Update a particular statuses of a user	PUT http://twitter.com/users/{user_id}/statuses/{status_id}.xml
Delete a particular statuses of a user	DELETE http://twitter.com/users/{user_id}/statuses/{status_id}.xml

So I think although Twitter API is really nice and easy, it is not really a RESTful API. If it was really RESTful, URLs might have been more organized so more easier to remember or predict. But still this API allows thousands of third party application to talk to the twitter, demonstrating the value of providing web services over just providing some web pages in a website.