[romeo88]

Are request parameters not a preferred choice? Especially if filtering for multiple authors.

GET /discussions?author=:authorId1,:authorId2

If both authors had participated.

Or if only one or the other had participated:

GET /discussions?author=:authorId1&author=:authorId2

[alganet]

Yes! Query string parameters are great for this kind of stuff.

I guess the choice on the URL format depends on how you're going to route that on the server side, so there are multiple ways of doing it.

Depending on the nature of the resource, you might have to be careful with URI canonicalization.

Consider for example the "diff between account balances" endpoint:

GET /account_balance_diff?accid=1&accid=2

Should the diff be presented as from 1 to 2, or from 2 to 1? Query string parameters don't have a particular order to them, and when canonicalizing, some user agent might decide to reorder these parameters.

If you do:

GET /account_balance_diff/1/2

Then, there are two distinct URIs (one for diff 1->2 and other 2->1) and no ambiguity on meaning.

You could also use some kind of index on the parameters to preserve order:

GET /account_balance_diff?acc[1]=123&acc[2]=456

Your other example using a comma should also be fine:

GET /account_balance_diff?accs=1,2

Let's go back to the "discussions" example. What should happen if I GET /discussions without any author id? Our inner guts tell us that there should be something there (after all, I'm filtering _something_), but REST implies absolutely nothing about this relation. To REST and HTTP, you could have a /discussions URL that is completely unrelated to /discussions?filter.

Having a concise, clear URL forming pattern is great. It's not REST though, it's a separate thing, incredibly relevant to us humans, but irrelevant to the architectural style.

A similar confusion happens with error codes. I've seen a lot of people answer 406 Not Acceptable as a status for lock errors and invalid requests. It sounds nice, but it's not designed for that. 406 means the server can't deliver that media type (you asked for PNG but I only have JPG, for example). That 406 is part of the content negotiation mechanism of HTTP, not a lego block to reuse as application logic. The URI is the same, it's role is to be a primary key for the web, not to express hierarchy.

(btw sorry for the long post, I ended up venting a lot and got into several tangents completely unrelated to your comment)