rest constraints prohibits use of cookies


The only term, when talking about REST compliance, can be not RESTful. Same thing applies here. It simply serves up the same data from cache that was served up less than a second ago. One can characterise applications conforming to the REST constraints

Or it is a REST or it is not REST.

No session, no history. I've updated the question to clarify - I'm not asking about authentication, and server side state is out of bounds. Google's services ensure that, at any time, you can take an authentication token you were using on your phone against load balance server A and hit load balance server B from your desktop and still have access to the system and be directed to the same resources if the requests were identical. Let's try to add a load balancer and another service instance to your system.

There is no reason why the client should not maintain state however, this is perfectly acceptable.

Short satire about a comically upscaled spaceship. You could tric around to concatenate like this: usernameRole:password, but this is bad practice, and it is also inefficient because when a user has more roles, the authentication engine would need to test all roles in concatenation, and that every call again. The Authorization header is more "self-documenting" than your cookie is, because "everyone" know what the Auth header is for.

It is an architecture style for designing loosely coupled applications over the network, that is often used in the development of web services. What it all boils down to is that you need to make sure your authentication tokens are validated against a backing store of some sort (database, cache, whatever) to ensure that you preserve as many of the REST properties as possible. Stateless and chaching are two different concepts. If you adhere to the REST precepts and constraints, then using sessions - to maintain state - will simply be superfluous.

It is particularly enlightening with regard to what the tenets of REST are actually arguing for and why. In my opinion there is nothing wrong with cookies. To subscribe to this RSS feed, copy and paste this URL into your RSS reader.

logically there's nothing stopping you from performing the authentication on every request. Most often, this is useful for very common requests and request parameters.

Rather, a stateful application is hard to cache as it needs to remember what to return based on user interaction. Hi, a question about cacheable, is it just about declaring whether is it cacheable or not or supporting the cache on both ends ? Most of the time, you will be sending the static representations of resources in the form of XML or JSON. REST does not enforce any rule regarding how it should be implemented at the lower level, it just put high-level design guidelines and leaves us to think of our own implementation. Each state can be completely Is storing a cookie on a "not used" URL good practice? Is it wrong to use sessions in Microservices? Like reading the name and email address, or listing their friends, etc After allowing a 3rd party client the server will generate an access token. Find centralized, trusted content and collaborate around the technologies you use most. I don't understand why everyone seems to accept the comment you should store passwords on the client side and send them with every request. @JonathanvandeVeen yes, of course you store it. Don't mix up per-user (ie connections) and per-user (ie per-user-secured resource).

HTTP itself doesnt impose any hard-coded limit on request length; but browsers have limits ranging on the 2kb 8kb.

We could argue that set cookie headers are part of the representation, but that's a half truth I think. This does violate REST principles slightly, because the server is tracking the state of the authentication key.

465). In this case the service directly changes the client state. So the basket is a resource in itself that is updated via POST requests. What makes session cookies RESTless?

(It could be a problem to work with cookie, e.g. Cookie blocked/not saved in IFRAME in Internet Explorer, Can you help me understand this? Please do not mix them. You can now choose to sort by Trending, which boosts votes that have happened recently, helping to surface more up-to-date answers.

https://jwt.io/. list of holidays in calendar year then you can mark the API as cacheable so client applications can create their own cached version of response and avoid one additional network call, completely. Each request must have authentication information in headers.

A quick read with a a very quick win.

Hey Zane, One example is that you can store the data being returned from the API, which is agnostic of who requests it.

Note that REST doesn't mean banning all state from the server, sometimes you genuinely want to update things; especially in the "airline ticket" example you might want to explicitly create a "reservation" object before payment with a POST that returns a URL for the reservation.

Another point is that, to obtain an authorization cookie, you'll probably want to supply your credentials somewhere first? Why is it common to put CSRF prevention tokens in cookies? Fieldings doctoral dissertation, describes Representational State Transfer (REST) as a key architectural principle of the World Wide Web. Before REST the architecture of the web was more or less non-existent.

Another client with identical request information would be taken to a different location depending on the server-side state. You should ask yourself what would happen when the server reboots. Yes, you are completely right.

Let us know if you liked the post. authentication is not prohibited for RESTfulness (otherwise there'd be little use in RESTful services), authentication is done by sending an authentication token in the request, usually the header, this authentication token needs to be obtained somehow and may be revoked, in which case it needs to be renewed, the authentication token needs to be validated by the server (otherwise it wouldn't be authentication), client-side, sessions are realized using cookies, a session cookie can be obtained and revoked at any time, session cookies can have an infinite life time if need be, the session id (authentication token) is validated server-side, Do you mean that REST service for http-use only or I got smth wrong?

next, and each such steady-state is both a potential start-state uniform set of actions to be understandable.

Caching can be implemented on the server or client-side.

I think when the server writes the cookies that is a grey zone thing, especially if we are talking about HTTP-only cookies (which are not accessible in browser javascript). How to help player quickly make a decision when they have no way of knowing which option is best. How should I deal with coworkers not respecting my blocking off time in my calendar for work?

Simple example: To sum this up, I believe that if we access some resource and we need to authenticate, then we must authenticate on that same resource, not anywhere else.

Its contents may be or may not be saved (for example, if cookies are disabled), while Authorization header is sent automatically on every request.

Software Engineering Stack Exchange is a question and answer site for professionals, academics, and students working within the systems development life cycle. If there was no session attached to the cookie value server-side, why would that make a difference? A must read for Api developers. There are some types of state that simply must be maintained and as long as you understand, Since no other arguments have been made so far, I'm accepting this well written response. I believe my larger point still stands though. I would rephrase your initial statement.

Google's web services are a fantastic example of a RESTful system.

Even if you manage to write a good HATEOAS API, your front-end is still not built to function only based on the REST responses. are always either at REST or transitioning from one RESTful (Depending on the scope of the answer I may be better off opening a new question for that). Notice that all the above constraints are most closely related to WWW (the web).

I just have one question about Stateless.

Why reinvent a wheel?

Ok, I rethought, the response of the REST service should not depend on the authorization, so I think the first 2 solutions are 100% okay, and the others are okay if the service uses the information only to decide whether it allows the request or not. The main determiner is this: if you send a REST call, which is a URI, then once the call makes it successfully to the server, does that URI return the same content, assuming no transitions have been performed (PUT, POST, DELETE)? What exactly is a resource?

In this post, I will be sharing my thoughts apart from standard design practices. In REST, caching shall be applied to resources when applicable, and then these resources MUST declare themselves cacheable.

So, in regards to being stateless, we are talking about the application data only.

How to help player quickly make a decision when they have no way of knowing which option is best. To subscribe to this RSS feed, copy and paste this URL into your RSS reader.

Whenever relevant, a resource should contain links (HATEOAS) pointing to relative URIs to fetch related information. I am an SAP ABAP developer who is trying to learn OData which uses RESTful architecture.

you can use OAuth, API Key (public /private) or other authentication system.

Difference between /usr/bin/strings and gstrings from binutils? Are you implying that what is cached by the Server is not session info? Today, this is standard practice in web development, so nothing fancy is required from your side. However, as I mentioned at the top of my post, sacrifices must be made to allow an application to actually work. I do think that technically it makes little difference, it's all just HTTP headers. Since I have posted this question I've totally come around to seeing that. Show that involves a character cloning his colleagues and making them into videogame characters? This constraint essentially means that client applications and server applications MUST be able to evolve separately without any dependency on each other. Are my assumptions wrong? REST is describing the web.

Is using sessions in a RESTful API really violating RESTfulness? I don't see how this sheds any light on the question posed.

As Im new to APIs this really gave me the explanation I needed to the meaning of REST. The point that Roy Fielding makes about cookies relates to sending these cookies to the server and maintaining state on the server based on those cookies.

This is the most basic 3rd party auth mechanism. Thanks for creating this complete guide as well, super useful! Is a neuron's information processing more complex than a perceptron? a complex state diagram, but each user agent is only able to see I mean cache of resource representations which have nothing to do with the client state and solely depends on the request parametres. So there is no problem with the technology itself, the problem is with its usage. Non of the applications built today has its application state driven solely by hypermedia. The system may be Fielding wrote a sub-section about why he thinks HTTP cookies are bad.

You don't need more to do this than HTTP basic auth and an encrypted connection: You probably need an in-memory auth cache on server side to make things faster, since you have to authenticate every request. However, at that point you have created your own architectural style. Servers and clients may also be replaced and developed independently, as long as the interface between them is not altered.

In the following blog post, Roy Fielding gave a nice summary of the whole REST idea: http://groups.yahoo.com/neo/groups/rest-discuss/conversations/topics/5841, "A RESTful system progresses from one steady-state to the

I'll extend this answer as soon as I got the proper solution.

"Common REST Mistakes: Sessions are irrelevant", Understanding REST: Verbs, error codes, and authentication. Session in RESTful web services, how it works? After that it can send a valid request with the API key and access token. Roy Fieldings REST alternative to HTTP cookies. You should have some kind of database to store this in right? If no, how does the caching help in this regard.

If we accept this then you are using tokens as most authentication systems do, in which case whatever mechanism we use to scale the tokens repository will have mostly equal scalability concerns as any session scalability. By session cookies you store the client state on the server and so your request has a context.

Well, this constraint is optional.

But the idea is that you update the state of the resource, not pass it around. To learn more, see our tips on writing great answers. Site design / logo 2022 Stack Exchange Inc; user contributions licensed under CC BY-SA.

Roy explains that cookies are a violation of REST as they introduce stateful behaviour - cached responses may no longer apply (for example, hitting the back button), and server-side statelessness is a constraint of REST. I mean of course the client and server are different things, but the only worthwhile information I can see being cached by the server is session info about the client making the request.

Not truly does not tell us anything useful we cant even quantify how close to REST. Or stats for the Payton Mannings last game.

Stack Exchange network consists of 180 Q&A communities including Stack Overflow, the largest, most trusted online community for developers to learn, share their knowledge, and build their careers. For example, if I have a. Or you set a persistent cookie with some hash (if it is registered on the server as a resource for a long while). So to even talk about things like headers, cookies, etc. Making statements based on opinion; back them up with references or personal experience. Question: does the no server-side statelessness constraint include databases, etc.? Use the X-XYZZY header.

I'll create a question about the permissions dependency of representations. So server side sessions violate the stateless constraint of REST, and so RESTfulness either. Thoughts?

If we use cookies, we fall into using HTTP as a transport protocol only, thus we need to create our own signaling system, for example, to tell users that they supplied wrong authentication (using HTTP 401 would be incorrect as we probably wouldn't supply Www-Authenticate to a client, as HTTP specs require :) ). Is there a faction in the Ukrainian parliament favoring an immediate ceasefire?

Caching a capability not dependent on statelessness. And most APIs built in public/private spaces are built like this. The webpage you are reading here is also a cached version of the HTML page.

Short satire about a comically upscaled spaceship. Caching brings performance improvement for the client-side and better scope for scalability for a server because the load has been reduced. The headers convey information. I'm reading Roy Fielding's dissertation Architectural Styles and the Design of Network-based Software Architectures, which introduces the REST architectural style. There's HTML5 local storage, which allows you to keep data without it contaminating the HTTP requests you make. EDIT: OAuth.

Fielding's dissertation: Question about trade-offs for the uniform interface constraint (5.1.5 Uniform Interface), Security Issues with RESTful Authentication & Session Management.

What does get sent to the server is the complete set of fields that need to be modified in the IDENTIFIED resource (by the URI), such that a transition occurs in that resource from one RESTful state to another. As such, cookies by themselves should not make an API RESTless, and sessions are simply cookies to the client.

It's true though that the, This doesn't really account for the fact that web browsers only support. In Uniform Interface section, there is an absolute statement: Its always better to synonymize a resource with a web page. Say, I have a webpage on a shopping website showing my past purchases on the right and purchase recommendations in the middle and my profile info at the top . No, of course not. In this way, your API doesnt have to go back into the DB, or even worse calculate, these numbers over and over again as 1000 calls are coming in. In this case you have to share the sessions between the service instances. Something such as the NFL schedule. stateless is the state of application, cachable is the cache of client quest and server response, they are at diffrent field, so you may can not compare between them. It will treat every request as new. But my point is that API-based auth isn't necessarily the only consideration in a browser scenario.

Thanks for contributing an answer to Stack Overflow! If your REST API has a different domain than your client, then set cookies only on the client domain and access their content for example with client side javascript if we are talking about browsers.

I'm honestly not sure how Google does it, but the expiration time could be encoded into the authentication token.

Thanks in advance! What does function composition being associative even mean? Do not worry, you are still making a RESTful API but not truly RESTful. I don't know whether caching and cookies conflict with each other. Finally, it will be a really bad design. If someone has another idea I will be glad to hear it. They are links from where latest state of resources can be pulled. Connect and share knowledge within a single location that is structured and easy to search. Can the endpoint url considered as a resource ? How to restrict access to users? To learn more, see our tips on writing great answers.

transitions that it provides, with the transitions limited to a How to protect against CSRF? Very nice explanation. This point is little fuzzy in the article apparently. [Link]. the Cookie header instead of the Authorization or some other

How should we do boxplots with small samples? Doesn't seem like it would be two hard to do. I know that if there is no persistence server side, then I can't share my basket between multiple devices, for example, but I just wanted to know about client-side state persistence techniques. I like this statement so much, it will be tattooed on my mind all the time: Servers and clients may also be replaced and developed independently, as long as the interface between them is not altered.. As such, to the client, a session cookie is exactly the same as any A client cannot ordinarily tell whether it is connected directly to the end server or an intermediary along the way. An unhashed password (which it would have to be to send it over and over) should never be stored anywhere. REST is about the application data, not about the low-level information required to get that data transferred about.

I cannot disagree because there is no official term for APIs not following all 6 constraints. This is all CLIENT CONTEXT, and should not be sent or tracked by the server. Thats the only way we can improve. Your point of view was pretty solid.

other HTTP header based authentication mechanism, except that it uses If the basket is held in a cookie, Logging in on a different client will not show my basket. For the case of client-defined limits, there is no sense on the server returning something, because the server wont receive the request at all.

from Mobile/Console/Desktop/etc.).

HTTP basic authentication is a real step backwards if you're trying to build a web app though. Asking for help, clarification, or responding to other answers.

@Jared Are you sure the Google auth token doesn't have the expiry date encoded into it? So I think the user permissions should effect on the representation of the current resource.

Do you name your variables in your code Aq12hsg? In the case of normal cookies, nothing relevant happens, your requests will be responded the same way as before.

Yes.

The only problem with the cookies, that session cookies are violating the statelessness constraint.

What purpose are these openings on the roof? You can read more about the implementation details in the documentation of every 3rd party auth system, e.g.

As API developer, you are responsible for server side caching (if caching is needed). Answer is Yes if infrasturture support it. JWT vs cookies for token-based authentication.

REST can work over any protocol, even though it happens to be routinely done over HTTP.

This test would exclude errors or authentication requests being returned, because in that case, the request has not yet made it to the server, meaning the servlet or application that will return the document corresponding to the given URI.