Facebook Relay: An Evil And/Or Incompetent Attack on REST
pandastrike.com
Facebook Relay: An Evil And/Or Incompetent Attack on REST
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Re: Facebook Relay: An Evil And/Or Incompetent Attack on REST
#2fwiw, pandastrike seems to be on a crusade against all things Facebook/React so take this with a grain of salt. https://twitter.com/vjeux/status/655128064754499588
Re: Facebook Relay: An Evil And/Or Incompetent Attack on REST
#3I have a problem taking seriously any article that spreads FUD by accusing their targets of spreading FUD.
The people who build React and the related ecosystem are incredibly smart people trying to make the web better. I'm certain there's no ill-intent in their motives. Regardless, they open source pretty aggressively. If an open technology from Facebook displaces another open technology from another source, I don't understand why we should be upset simply because the backer of the more popular technique was Facebook.
Re: Facebook Relay: An Evil And/Or Incompetent Attack on REST
#4> a REST endpoint can return whatever you want. If you only want a subset of that graph, make an endpoint around that subset.
So we have to make endpoints around every possible subset?
> You want to avoid large object graphs anyway, for two reasons. Returning coarse-gained chunks of data tends to work against effective caching strategies, whether you're using REST, Relay, or anything else. You have to cache the whole chunk or nothing.
I thought the whole point of Relay et al. was that it would cache the union of the chunks, such that when I request more data, it can download only the exact pieces I need?
Re: Facebook Relay: An Evil And/Or Incompetent Attack on REST
#5> a REST endpoint can return whatever you want. If you only want a subset of that graph, make an endpoint around that subset. So we have to make endpoints around every possible subset? > You want to avoid large object graphs anyway, for two reasons. Returning coarse-gained chunks of data tends to work against effective caching strategies, whether you're using REST, Relay, or anything else. You have to cache the whole…
"So we have to make endpoints around every possible subset?"
No, you use the query in querystring. One way or another you're offering a query interface. A lot of REST is just about how you offer the same interfaces you were planning on offering anyhow. Which is probably a source of a lot of the frustration REST advocates experience. If you're genuinely doing something that REST can't do very well, OK then, but if you're doing something that HTTP can already do, why layer something else on top of HTTP that HTTP is already doing?
(Sometimes there are good answers to that question, though.)
Re: Facebook Relay: An Evil And/Or Incompetent Attack on REST
#6I'm not an expert on REST by any means, but it seems like that guy is sort of intentionally misrepresenting what they're doing. They didn't say Rest isn't good. They said that Rest isn't good for what they're doing with it. If you don't like it, don't use it.
Re: Facebook Relay: An Evil And/Or Incompetent Attack on REST
#7An interesting comparison might be to something like sending protocol buffers over the wire instead of JSON [1].
You can make a 100% valid and spirited defense of JSON (human readable! lots of open source tooling!) which at Facebook's scale is trumped by "well it works 20% faster and we have 400 million users that will see the benefit".
And that scale aspect of this really matters. OP is completely correct in the criticisms that X_NEW_THING can be done in REST, but with the number of users + infrastructure that Facebook is dealing with, small improvements can really matter.
1 - https://code.facebook.com/posts/872547912839369/improving-fa...
Re: Facebook Relay: An Evil And/Or Incompetent Attack on REST
#8[deleted]
Re: Facebook Relay: An Evil And/Or Incompetent Attack on REST
#9I have a problem taking seriously any article that spreads FUD by accusing their targets of spreading FUD. The people who build React and the related ecosystem are incredibly smart people trying to make the web better. I'm certain there's no ill-intent in their motives. Regardless, they open source pretty aggressively. If an open technology from Facebook displaces another open technology from another source, I don't…
This site has a habit of doing that, it seems: https://twitter.com/vjeux/status/655128064754499588
The reasoning in all three of those posts feels super shallow; I have the most experience with React, and he's setting off a bunch of alarms in my head. "We don't need React because we have Web Components"--if Web Components were as high-perf ("they're getting faster so we don't need workarounds") or as just-plain-easy to work with (crickets!) even for a JavaScript dolt like me, maybe that'd be true. "But but open, but Facebook evil" is not a good-enough reason to use things that don't offer clear benefits. When Facebook twirls its evil mustachios and suddenly Embraces and Extends with...their...BSD-licensed software, I may worry. Somehow I'm not betting on that.
(He might even have a good point about the tight coupling of React, except that React, and indeed all of my JavaScript, is the presentational layer, and anything important is behind the API anyway.)
Re: Facebook Relay: An Evil And/Or Incompetent Attack on REST
#10> a REST endpoint can return whatever you want. If you only want a subset of that graph, make an endpoint around that subset. So we have to make endpoints around every possible subset? > You want to avoid large object graphs anyway, for two reasons. Returning coarse-gained chunks of data tends to work against effective caching strategies, whether you're using REST, Relay, or anything else. You have to cache the whole…
s/catch/cache/ ?