I'm designing an HTTP-based API for an intranet app. I realize it's a pretty small concern in the grand scheme of things, but: should I use hyphens, underscores, or camelCase to delimit words in the URIs?
Here are my initial thoughts:
camelCase
Hyphen
Underscore
I'm leaning towards underscores for everything. The fact that most of the big players are using them is compelling (see https://stackoverflow.com/a/608458/360570).
This question is related to
rest
url
uri
restful-url
In general, it's not going to have enough of an impact to worry about, particularly since it's an intranet app and not a general-use Internet app. In particular, since it's intranet, SEO isn't a concern, since your intranet shouldn't be accessible to search engines. (and if it is, it isn't an intranet app).
And any framework worth it's salt either already has a default way to do this, or is fairly easy to change how it deals with multi-word URL components, so I wouldn't worry about it too much.
That said, here's how I see the various options:
Hyphen
Underscore
CamelCase
/
anyways. If you find that you have a URL component that is more than 2 "words" long, you should probably try to find a better name for that concept.Short Answer:
Long Answer:
What is the purpose of a URL?
If pointing to an address is the answer, then a shortened URL is also doing a good job. If we don't make it easy to read and maintain, it won't help developers and maintainers alike. They represent an entity on the server, so they must be named logically.
Google recommends using hyphens
Consider using punctuation in your URLs. The URL http://www.example.com/green-dress.html is much more useful to us than http://www.example.com/greendress.html. We recommend that you use hyphens (-) instead of underscores (_) in your URLs.
Coming from a programming background, camelCase is a popular choice for naming joint words.
But RFC 3986 defines URLs as case-sensitive for different parts of the URL. Since URLs are case sensitive, keeping it low-key (lower cased) is always safe and considered a good standard. Now that takes a camel case out of the window.
Source: https://metamug.com/article/rest-api-naming-best-practices.html#word-delimiters
It is recommended to use the spinal-case (which is highlighted by RFC3986), this case is used by Google, PayPal, and other big companies.
source:- https://blog.restcase.com/5-basic-rest-api-design-guidelines/
The standard best practice for REST APIs is to have a hyphen, not camelcase or underscores.
This comes from Mark Masse's "REST API Design Rulebook" from Oreilly.
In addition, note that Stack Overflow itself uses hyphens in the URL: .../hyphen-underscore-or-camelcase-as-word-delimiter-in-uris
As does WordPress: http://inventwithpython.com/blog/2012/03/18/how-much-math-do-i-need-to-know-to-program-not-that-much-actually
here's the best of both worlds.
I also "like" underscores, besides all your positive points about them, there is also a certain old-school style to them.
So what I do is use underscores and simply add a small rewrite rule to your Apache's .htaccess file to re-write all underscores to hyphens.
Whilst I recommend hyphens, I shall also postulate an answer that isn't on your list:
Nothing At All
/quotationrequests/
, /purchaseorders/
and so on.?q=foo+bar
Source: Stackoverflow.com