[tahoe-dev] Fwd: [tor-relays] [ANNOUNCE] check_tor.py: a Nagios check for Tor relays

[Kevin Reid]

On Feb 26, 2013, at 5:38, kpneal at pobox.com wrote:

> On Mon, Feb 25, 2013 at 08:29:48PM -0800, Peter Secor wrote:
>> The WUI usually has a pretty good json representation of most screens, just tack on a query arg ?t=json to the WUI URL and see what you get. I used to use it a lot when running scripts to check node usage but it's also useful for scraping other node stats. 
> 
> The correct way to do this is to send an "Accept: application/json" header in the request. Don't change the url to specify the type of return data. The response should have the same mime type.
> 
> This follows normal REST design patterns.

While it is true that a server should always respect the Accept header, and that programmatic interactions should make use of it, I disagree that a URL parameter is *inappropriate to offer*; the URL parameter is highly useful for debugging/exploration, and from a REST+caps perspective can be seen as an alternate resource (facet) with fewer available representations.

That is, the server should support *both* Accept and ?t=, and clients should prefer to use Accept (at least, they should prefer Accept over matching and modifying a URL they receive).

-- 
Kevin Reid                                  <http://switchb.org/kpreid/>