On the Qandidate.com blog today there's a new tutorial talking about the use of the Accept header in REST HTTP requests and, more specifically, working with it in a Symfony-based application.

I investigated different ways to version a REST API. Most of the sources I found, pretty much all said the same thing. To version any resource on the internet, you should not change the URL. The web isn't versioned, and changing the URL would tell a client there is more than 1 resource. [...] Another thing, and probably even more important, you should always try to make sure your changes are backwards compatible. That would mean there is a lot of thinking involved before the actual API is built, but it can also save you from a big, very big headache. [...] Of course there are always occasions where BC breaks are essential in order to move forward. In this case versioning becomes important. The method that I found, which appears to be the most logical, is by requesting a specific API version using the Accept header.

He shows how to create a "match request" method in his custom Router that makes use of the AcceptHeader handling to grab the header data and parse it down into the type and API version requested. He also includes an example of doing something similar in the Symfony configuration file but hard-coding the condition for the API version by endpoint.