[SOLVED] Should I use Singular or Plural name convention for REST resources?

Should I use Singular or Plural name convention for REST resources?

Some RESTful services use different resource URIs for update/get/delete and Create. Such as

Create - using /resources with POST method (observe plural) at some places using /resource (singular)
Update - using /resource/123 with PUT method
Get - Using /resource/123 with GET method

I'm little bit confused about this URI naming convention. Should we use plural or singular for resource creation? What should be the criteria while deciding that?

Solution

The premise of using /resources is that it is representing "all" resources. If you do a GET /resources, you will likely return the entire collection. By POSTing to /resources, you are adding to the collection.

However, the individual resources are available at /resource. If you do a GET /resource, you will likely error, as this request doesn't make any sense, whereas /resource/123 makes perfect sense.

Using /resource instead of /resources is similar to how you would do this if you were working with, say, a file system and a collection of files and /resource is the "directory" with the individual 123, 456 files in it.

Neither way is right or wrong, go with what you like best.