URI Template

This is one of two proposed standards I've been following with some interest, the other being a sane(ish) way to implement PATCH for JSON objects:

http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc6902

There's a mature Perl module for this as well: http://search.cpan.org/~bricas/URI-Template-0.17/lib/URI/Tem...

For rubyists, the addressable gem has support for it: https://github.com/sporkmonger/addressable/tree/#uri-templat...

It's pretty great to have a standard for templates to generate URIs, but it's equally important to parse URIs and extract the variables. It looks like this RFC skimps on that part:

In Section 1.4:

    Some URI Templates can be used in reverse for the purpose of variable
    matching: comparing the template to a fully formed URI in order to
    extract the variable parts from that URI and assign them to the named
    variables.  Variable matching only works well if the template
    expressions are delimited by the beginning or end of the URI or by
    characters that cannot be part of the expansion, such as reserved
    characters surrounding a simple string expression.  In general,
    regular expression languages are better suited for variable matching.

It'd be better IMO to have a stricter definition of parseable templates and include test cases so that implementations that try to validate templates for parseability don't disagree.

I wonder if it'd be worth implementing this in my URLObject library (https://github.com/zacharyvoase/urlobject).

Slightly related (if you hold your head at the right angle) is the (commercial) platform called NetKernel. It brings URIs into conventional programming scenarios, presenting something like a RESTful programming language. (Whatever that might mean...)

I haven't done anything with it, but I find it fascinating just to read the documentation:

http://docs.netkernel.org/book/view/book:quickstart/doc:quic...

GitHub uses URI templates extensively: https://api.github.com/

Very helpful, thanks for link. I'm working on my own web app "framework" and had rolled my own URL/URI router. This will reduce my reinvention quotient.

Ruby Gems for this https://github.com/sporkmonger/addressable

Why do RFC's have to be so ugly?