[mercurial]

Interesting. What is the reason for grouping method calls together? Is this to reduce the number of requests sent to the server? If not, is there no way of providing a higher level operation instead of bundled discrete operations?

In any case, I think you could have something a lot closer to REST, even if you carry on with grouping calls together.

Something like:

    [
        [ "GET", "/messages", { "search": "foo" }],
        [ "GET", "/mailboxes", { "etag": "bar" }]
    ]

Obviously, you're not limited to HTTP verbs if you do it like this, but it's a familiar metaphor.

[nmjenkins]

(Author of the spec here)

REST is way too slow. The JMAP format massively reduces round trip times, especially when you have sequential operations where you must wait for one to finish before the next can happen. And once you're not doing REST, I don't personally think putting HTTP verbs in the method calls doesn't really make it any clearer, and is just likely to confuse matters.

[mercurial]

> The JMAP format massively reduces round trip times, especially when you have sequential operations where you must wait for one to finish before the next can happen.

I hear you (REST and batch operations don't mix too well). But wouldn't it be possible to simply provide higher level operations, grouping several of these commands?

> And once you're not doing REST, I don't personally think putting HTTP verbs in the method calls doesn't really make it any clearer, and is just likely to confuse matters.

As I said, it wouldn't necessarily be restricted to HTTP verbs (eg, using 'create' and 'update' instead of 'POST' and 'PUT'), but I do like the idea of separating the resource you act on from the action on this resource.

[nona]

I didn't take the time yet to have a proper look at it, but nothing stops you from doing batch REST operations on collections. You can do compound documents - with references - à la jsonapi.org. One thing I would consider essential though, is using RFC2518 MOVE, COPY etc, you really want to do those server-side.

Do you have an example of the type of operation that would map poorly to REST?