To be honest, I just kind of don't understand the point. Could my API be better following some of these rules the author presented? Probably. But by how much? Is it worth it? When someone else on my team disagrees do we go back and argue about the spec again?
After 12+ years I'm just not sure anymore. If I'm using REST incorrectly (according to this article or others), but getting good results and everyone on the team is aligned, does it matter? I'm willing to have my mind changed this, maybe I'm missing something important
There are groups of people using the same terms for different things, and getting into arguments where there could be agreement.
There's a diverse set of people on the spectrum between formally trained and self taught people in software development. Terms can get borrowed from places like academic research and get (mis)applied before they are understood.
The REST in industry software is essentially JSON RPC (no, not that one) mapped to HTTP methods. That's a mouthful, so people just say RESTful, despite it not quite being RESTful according to the original notion of REST.
Yes, industry-RESTful isn't necessarily RESTful according to original Roy Fielding definition, but trying to redefine a widely used industry term is unlikely to win one friends at dinner parties.
But that said, I'm okay with it not following the spec as long as things are clearly documented to end users. We just went through an issue where a prominent CDN provider exposing a REST API we depend on broke REST in a very important way (i.e. NOT stateless). It's extremely annoying to try and construct clients around nonstandard APIs, and the more REST-y, the less annoying.
Better to just pick something and go with it, then argue about the spec more
Yes, and this blog post is exactly yet another example. Some of the blogger's points are blatant violations of REST, such as the comments on URIs and api versioning. Yet, the blogger elevates their own personal misconceptions to the status of one true RESTful way.
Ultimately it's all mostly irrelevant. All it matters is that the contract is specified and preserved and clients can consume services through a specific interface. Furthermore the pervasive use of openapi specs already crystalize the RPC approach to interfaces.
Problem Details (RFC 9457) are useful and have made an occasional appearance, but actual hypermedia driven APIs with custom media types seem to be non-existent outside of example blog posts. It's much more common to instead see APIs overload lesser-used HTTP status codes with their own domain-specific meanings. But if I'm being honest, this sort of protocol crime almost never caused an actual problem in practice.
The advocacy for "true REST" is missing a compelling argument and useful example of why it would actually be an improvement. Despite its prominence, for over 20 years almost nobody has used this approach. Why is that?
I do still have an aesthetic appreciation for "true REST", but in practice I find the fact that nobody uses it to be mainly useful in ending bikeshedding discussions. Once you understand your API isn't RESTful to begin with, there's no longer any point in arguing if 411 or 412 is the more RESTful status code to use when a user attempts to order a product without specifying a quantity. (Spoiler: neither is correct) You simply send a 400 with Problem Details and call it a day. Ironically, this indifference may make your API just a little bit more RESTful.
Edit: a few minutes after I wrote that I had the thought, what if this is someone else’s arc with AI code. A lot of people seem to care a whole awful lot right now. A decade time horizon is interesting to think about.
I think I have a fundamental objection to the idea that Fielding and Fielding alone got to decide what REST is. While there hasn't been any kind of formal counterproposal, in some sense REST is what we make of it. Re: http 400 codes, I think many of us really liked the general principle of "use http semantics!" and applied that to error codes as well. That's agreeing with the principle and extending it in new ways that we like and are "truer" to the principle, even if it wasn't intended.
In my mind this is sort of analogous to talking about the relationship between linux and unix. Linux is clearly not a genetic or copyright unix, but I've seen it said before that linux is the culmination of unix principles, in some cases extended beyond what was originally envisioned in ways that are innovative and genuine improvements (io_uring perhaps?).
The REST we have today - http semantics, specific error codes, etc - may be significantly different from what Fielding may have wanted, but IMO it implements the parts that really distinguish it from the RPC world of API architecture, and I think we're generally happy with that.
There is one highly successful use of REST: the World Wide Web.
The Web/Web browsers are driven from hypermedia. (This is circular, as Fielding was looking at the web when making his dissertation.)
Granted, Web browsers stand alone as an application with extreme flexibility.
So REST is both highly common and very rare, depending on how you count.
This part is a complete and total fairy tale. No API consumer wants to operate in a world where the API could "change without notice." In real life, no provider would expect that of their clients, and no client would seriously accept that before every API request, they must first hierarchically rediscover the provider's dynamic url scheme of the moment, in order to traverse down to resource they ultimately want to request.
There has never been any serious commercial or high-traffic API that implemented this. And it's not because "lame corporate tech teams aren't hip to the true meaning of REST" -- it's because "it doesn't actually make sense to do it that way so nobody wants it to work like that."
> REST (Representational State Transfer) is a software architectural style that was created to describe the design and guide the development of the architecture for the World Wide Web. REST defines a set of constraints for how the architecture of a distributed, Internet-scale hypermedia system, such as the Web, should behave.
And isn't it always misused, mis-represented basically all the time? Often confused with things that are basically just JSON API(s)?
I think the REST Architectural Pattern is great but I don't use it anymore. Instead I create ROUSED services.
Resource
Oriented
Unconstrained
Sensible
Enterprise
Services
Unconstrained because I don't let some specification control how I work.
Sensible because things still need to be internaly consistent and well thought out.
Enterprise because the fact is I'm always making these services for some 'boring' business use case.
Services that provide some specific set of bounded capabilities within the usual messy ecosystem present at a SaaS software company.
I think we owe a lot to Roy Fielding for the potent ideas but as others have argued eloquently, reality sets in and you have to adapt to circumstances.
With how narrow this scope ends up being I can understand how most of the tech industry collectively had what appears to be a collective brain fart when Fielding said "hey this web thing is doing something really novel in the field of application design, lets talk about it" and went "herp derp, REST == HTTP, sounds good to me". I mean I understand it, but still find it funny.
https://htmx.org/essays/how-did-rest-come-to-mean-the-opposi...
And here is why REST is probably largely pointless in machine-to-machine APIs:
https://intercoolerjs.org/2016/05/08/hatoeas-is-for-humans.h...
https://github.com/NationalBankBelgium/REST-API-Design-Guide...
but people who didn't understand rest some of them migrated to graphql or rpc.
The example given in this section... is there actually a commonly used REST api that uses that particular key/structure? I wouldn't be _surprised_ if I came across that in some random API's documentation, but I hardly think it's the 'usual' thing to do.
The article later claims that that style is from https://stateless.co/hal_specification.html , which I think is a consultancy company whose major partners are all casinos (am I totally off on this?). The article also references (https://github.com/kevinswiber/siren which adds detail re: http methods embedded in the _links structure, but I'm not sure why that repo should be considered authoritative. 1300 stars for a just a spec is actually not bad though I think, so maybe.
Overall this article seems like slop produces from some kind of ai crawler that managed to dig up a couple of random links.
I am glad that it mentions rfc9457 though.
Conditional requests feel like the other omission. ETag and 304 are part of the same "use HTTP as intended" argument, and they change client behaviour more often than whether someone hardcoded a route.