Infrastructure

The DataONE MN and CN REST URL endpoints have emerged somewhat organically and should be refactored to provide consistency with naming and plurality.

It was decided (2012-04-25) to delay the refactoring until a later release (perhaps v1.4) because:

1. The current implementation works, and so refactoring would be primarily for cosmetic reasons offering no functional improvements.
2. There is insufficient time to make the changes and still expect to maintain a release schedule
3. Any changes made now would be to minimize impact on the release process, and so would not be a full refactoring of the REST endpoints, thus it would be necessary to revisit later anyway.
4. PIDs should be properly URL path encoded and so their location within URLs should not matter. However, ensuring that encoded paths are passed through to the node service applications involves configuration of web servers different from their default, and may have different behavior across different versions of a web server product. Hence thorough testing of all services in all server / environment combinations should be performed.
5. Changes to REST endpoints would require other node implementors to follow suit ASAP, and this may impose an unreasonable burden on those development activities.