RESTful Authentication

Question

What does RESTful Authentication mean and how does it work? I can\'t find a good overview on Google. My only understanding is that you pass the session key (remeberal) in

Answer 1

To be honest with you I've seen great answers here but something that bothers me a bit is when someone will take the whole Stateless concept to a extreme where it becomes dogmatic. It reminds me of those old Smalltalk fans that only wanted to embrace pure OO and if something is not an object, then you're doing it wrong. Give me a break.

The RESTful approach is supposed to make your life easier and reduce the overhead and cost of sessions, try to follow it as it is a wise thing to do, but the minute you follow a discipline (any discipline/guideline) to the extreme where it no longer provides the benefit it was intended for, then you're doing it wrong. Some of the best languages today have both, functional programming and object orientation.

If the easiest way for you to solve your problem is to store the authentication key in a cookie and send it on HTTP header, then do it, just don't abuse it. Remember that sessions are bad when they become heavy and big, if all your session consists of is a short string containing a key, then what's the big deal?

I am open to accept corrections in comments but I just don't see the point (so far) in making our lives miserable to simply avoid keeping a big dictionary of hashes in our server.