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REST is the new SOAP

medium.com

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Re: REST is the new SOAP

#181

Post by frik »

sctb wrote: post #146
frik wrote: post #17

Article reads like being from a crumpy snarky old age dev who lives in his XML-land filter bubble of the 1990s. Go back to XMLRPC and SOAP please. This site is getting more of these corporate old farts lately that don't want to adjust at all. I wish the time back when this site was about startup news, VCs, and new exiting things and not about whining and boring stuff.

We've asked you many times to please comment civilly and substantively, and yet you've continued to repeatedly violate the guidelines, so we've banned the account. We're happy to unban accounts if you email us at hn@ycombinator.com and we believe you'll start following the guidelines. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Okay sorry, yes this comment is over the top, but it reflects my feeling lately on HN.

I tried several times, but it seems constructive criticism or criticism isn't wanted. Proposing changing the voting system to up voting only, and create a report button. The downvoting makes a lot of bad things possible.

Several people sent me mails recently, responding that they fear they would get banned if they write as open and free as I do, and free speech isn't a thing on HN. Well, unfortunately it seems they were right.

And if you verify all the HN news that got moderated/hidden that don't suite your world view, it is appalling. (I don't know if it just the view of two moderators (dang, sctb, maybe a third) or of more people behind.)

In a newspaper I read recently that HN forum is a kind experimental model for Democracy 2.0, and featured as negative example were unpleasant comments get hell banned. Sounds more like communism of the 1970s, than what our country "is" and "needs" as model.

Anyway, I would like to see HN as news site for startups, VCs and SV. Not boring things from corporate IT and PR for them. What's the goal of HN? Cater all, or cater the startups and VCs and Ycombinator? Hint: there is already Reddit, for the rest. Please focus on the first, and move the offtopic stuff to a new "page two".

Re: REST is the new SOAP

#182

Post by 0x445442 »

ivan_gammel wrote: post #99
lfischer wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How exactly do you think REST is easier to debug and what alternatives are you comparing it to?

Crafting REST request with JSON payload is significantly easier than doing that with SOAP (or, rest it in peace, CORBA).

That is highly dependent on the language you are using.

Many languages support auto generation of consumer and producer code based off of WSDLs.

And AFAIK, most languages that don't have the auto gen tools do have XPATH libraries for easily manipulating templated SOAP requests.

Re: REST is the new SOAP

#183

Post by digi_owl »

noonespecial wrote: post #160
barrkel wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yup. It's the mechanism behind programming as a pop culture. Kids without a lot of experience are sick of the old way because it's too hairy and complicated, they come out with a fresh new approach that isn't nearly as broadly applicable, then it gets improved until it's fit for general purpose, at which point it's hairy and complicated and the cycle starts again. I don't think that everything is standing still, thou…

The best technologies can be understood and used in a simple case by a beginner but still "unfurl" to handle the general case. The worst force you to embrace the entire complexity before you can even hello world. Progress is being made.

Aka JWZ's Cascade of Attention Deficit Teenagers (CADT).

Re: REST is the new SOAP

#184

Post by jchw »

mgkimsal wrote: post #179
jchw wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm remaining firmly unconvinced. REST is an anti-standard. It doesn't tell you what to do, it just gives you some guidelines of sorts. And honestly, you don't even have to follow them - the spirit of REST is in simple JSON + HTTP-based operations. As an example, this? createAccount(username, contact_email, password) -> account_id addSubscription(account_id, subscription_type) -> subscription_id sendActivationReminde…

> Or an unending number of other interpretations and when someone joins the team and raises endless arguments with you about how what is already working isn't REST, because their interpretation is different, you have problems. and when you have a client that insists that you're not following REST conventions because your endpoints take POST for everything and don't take actual PUT commands, and they are not going to…

I could say the exact same thing about RPC. API design is difficult, largely in part because programmer types often refuse to acknowledge the "design" part. REST actually improves this by providing a sane set of ideas to base your web API design off of. It only makes it worse if you want it to.

REST has plenty of nice advantages people ignore too, like for example, often with REST APIs, ACL and authentication can be handled much easier because you can use URLs as a primitive for permissions.

Re: REST is the new SOAP

#185

Post by coldtea »

bbarn wrote: post #13

Why is REST so popular? Because it's easy to implement and works for lots of use cases. I'm sorry that you found places it doesn't, but in the real world, having been through that SOAP pain it's being compared to, I'd say there's not even a comparison. Everyone seems to want to find a reason to dislike product/technology/feature X but in this case, X is just better than anything we've had for a 90% adoption case. Wha…

>Why is REST so popular? Because it's easy to implement and works for lots of use cases.

Could have given the exact same non-argument for SOAP -- which in its time dominated corporate services.

Whether it's "easy to implement and works for lots of use cases", it's a moot point if there would be something even easier to implement and worked even better for real use cases.

Why stop at "easy" when you can have easier AND more coherent?

Besides, REST is anything like easy. Case in point, almost nobody ever correctly implemented the original REST spec -- that's why everybody calls their implementations "REST-ful", they are some loosely inspired deviations that cargo cult a lot of useless junk.

Supposedly the "real illuminated REST" (like real communism) doesn't even concern HTTP, it's a philosophy beyond web services. And yet's it's all the web related garbage part of the introductory examples that everybody follows (or tries to).

Re: REST is the new SOAP

#186

Post by 0x445442 »

It seems to me REST offers no real advantages over other specifications/protocols from a server side perspective. And the reason for REST proliferation has been about the rise of SPA JS frameworks.

Re: REST is the new SOAP

#187

Post by digi_owl »

speedplane wrote: post #24

Lots of comments here arguing REST is popular because it's easy, but there's another higher level reason too: it forces you to think about the network. In far too many RPC protocols, calling functions that operate over a network are treated like normal functions. A function call, almost by definition, fails to take into account network errors, and race conditions where multiple events overlap. Network calls are not f…

I worry that this is something that can be applied to programming in general these days.

Back in the day of the C64 etc, programmers had to worry about the underlying hardware as they were for the most part working with assembly.

But as increasingly abstract languages have come to be (most modern ones use virtual machines and garbage collectors), the programmer never have to consider the hardware their code has to interact with at some point. End result is all manner of bloat and memory leakage.

Re: REST is the new SOAP

#188

Post by digi_owl »

adrianmsmith wrote: post #37

I think there’s a tendency in software for people to start out without understanding all the complexities they’re going to encounter. I think this is just human nature. When you start out doing RPC you think, I don’t want to bother with schemas, I don’t want to bother with hierarchical error codes, I don’t foresee the need to set the user’s password but not retrieve it. So you don’t want to bother with a technology w…

Applies just as much to "middleware" as languages, sadly.

And thus we have a constant churn of dependencies an broken APIs/ABIs...

Re: REST is the new SOAP

#189

Post by jimnotgym »

bbarn wrote: post #13

Why is REST so popular? Because it's easy to implement and works for lots of use cases. I'm sorry that you found places it doesn't, but in the real world, having been through that SOAP pain it's being compared to, I'd say there's not even a comparison. Everyone seems to want to find a reason to dislike product/technology/feature X but in this case, X is just better than anything we've had for a 90% adoption case. Wha…

> What is it with Medium.com

The people you describe used to have blogs with crappy Wordpress themes that barely got noticed by Google, now they are on a big site so get discovered I guess?

Re: REST is the new SOAP

#190

Post by acjohnson55 »

I agree with the article. Fortunately, REST is dead. I'm fully confident that in 5 years, newcomers to web development will simply learn GraphQL.

I realize that's a strident statement, but I really believe that.

It is basically a restrictive implementation of RPC, which captures the reality that clients often need to ask for follow up data based on the result of a query. There are a couple needs that don't have fully baked solutions yet, but it's already extremely handy. It reminds me of what BEM did for taking the decision fatigue out of writing CSS.

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