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I'm implementing a RESTful API which exposes Orders as a resource and supports pagination through the resultset: GET /orders?start=1&end=30 where the orders to paginate are sorted by ordered_at timestamp, descending. This is basically approach #1 from the SO question Pagination in a REST web application . If the user requests the second page of orders ( GET /orders?start=31&end=60 ), the server simply re-queries the orders table, sorts by ordered_at DESC again and returns the records in positions 31 to 60. The problem I have is: what happens if the resultset changes (e.g. a new order is added) while the user is viewing the records? In the case of a new order being added, the user would see the old order #30 in first position on the second page of results (because the same order is now #31). Worse, in the case of a deletion, the user sees the old order #32 in first position on the second page (#31) and wouldn't see the old order #31 (now #30) at all. I can't see a solution to this without somehow making the RESTful server stateful (urg) or building some pagination intelligence into each client... What are some established techniques for dealing with this? For completeness: my back-end is implemented in Scala/Spray/Squeryl/Postgres; I'm building two front-end clients, one in backbone.js and the other in Python Django.

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