I'm specifically interested in how users perform authorized / authenticated operations on a web API.Are authentication cookies compatible with the REST philosophy, and why?
Should cookies be used in a RESTful API?
web applications;web services;rest
An ideal ReSTful service allows clients (which may not be in-browser) to perform any needed task in one request; because the full state needed to do that is held by the client, not the server.  Since the client has full control of the state, it can create the state on its own (if that is legitimate), and only talk to the API to get 'er done.Requiring cookies can make that difficult.  For clients besides browsers, managing cookies is a pretty big inconvenience compared to query params, plain request headers or the request body.  On the other hand, In browser, using cookies can make lots of things much simpler.  So an API might first look in the Authorization header for the authentication data it needs, since that's probably the place where non-browser clients will prefer to put it, but to simplify and streamline browser-based clients, it might also check for a session cookie for server side log in, but only if the regular Authorization header was missing.Another example might be a complex request that normally requires lots of parameters set.  A non interactive client would have no trouble jamming all of that data into one request, but a HTML form based interface might prefer to break the request into several pages (something like a set of 'wizard' pages) so that users aren't presented with options that are not applicable based on previous selections.  All of the intermediate pages could store the values in client side cookies, so that only the very last page, where the user actually submits the request, has any server side effect at all.  The API could look for the needed attributes in the request body, and fall back to looking at cookies if the needed parameters weren't there.