Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

REST is the new SOAP

medium.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

311–320 of 351 posts

Re: REST is the new SOAP

#311

Post by mamon »

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).

Have you ever seen SoapUI tool[1] ?

It takes just a few clicks to generate complete set of requests from WSDL (set, as in "one request per each operation"). I think it's much better user experience than hand-crafting json to use with curl.

[1] https://www.soapui.org/

Re: REST is the new SOAP

#312

Post by quantumofmalice »

niftich wrote: post #201

I author REST APIs and try to do them properly, with mediatypes, link relations, and all the good hypermedia stuff most people avoid. Nonetheless, the author's post reflects the sort of rant I've had to coworkers at the watercooler, or anyone who'd listen. The author nicely preempts the debate about HATEOAS and "most RESTful APIs aren't REST" and shows that the debate is part of the problem. It is. It's not a spec bu…

As I mentioned elsewhere in the thread, there are two posts on the intercooler site that specifically addresses this issue that I found very compelling:

http://intercoolerjs.org/2016/01/18/rescuing-rest.html

http://intercoolerjs.org/2016/05/08/hatoeas-is-for-humans.ht...

Re: REST is the new SOAP

#313

Post by nakovet »

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…

I don't get why the main thread is an attack to the blogging platform instead of a discussion on the topic.

IMHO REST is not easy to implement, it's easy to say "oh... okay I think I've got it... let me try" but it's very hard to implement RESTful APIs and the author mention a few valid pain points.

Simple use cases like: a user forgot their password, what the proper way of handling this case? A PATCH for a User based on ID? If the ID is a integer ID then you have to query user by email or username before you are able to request a new password, if the PATCH handles this case what other cases does it handle? Can a user request a new password and change their age at the same time, is this a valid case? How you structure your controller to route to these special cases, do you create a custom endpoint thus making your API less restful?

One thing I like about GraphQL is this idea of mutations, in many cases they are analogous to RPC calls, `userForgotPassword(usernameOrEmail) -> forgotPasswordResult`.

Re: REST is the new SOAP

#314

Post by shintakezou »

DarkCrusader2 wrote: post #25
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…

I avoid medium posts as much as possible. Everyone is an expert on there with very strong opinions telling me how every technology older than 2 years and not written in javascript is obsolete/dead/not the right way/new . And what's with the UI on their publications. They take up top 25% of the screen with the branding and navbar and bottom 10% asking me to sign in and both sticks on the screen. Who approved that?

Isn't it just a content container? I mean, saying "I avoid medium" sounds like saying "I avoid wordpress" or "I avoid blogspot", speaking of content quality and not look&feel. About this one, I'm logged in, so I have to suppose your % (25% and 10%) don't apply to the logged-in case, also because as soon as I scroll down, all those frills disappears and there's only the text.

Re: REST is the new SOAP

#315

Post by detaro »

shintakezou wrote: post #314
DarkCrusader2 wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I avoid medium posts as much as possible. Everyone is an expert on there with very strong opinions telling me how every technology older than 2 years and not written in javascript is obsolete/dead/not the right way/new . And what's with the UI on their publications. They take up top 25% of the screen with the branding and navbar and bottom 10% asking me to sign in and both sticks on the screen. Who approved that?

Isn't it just a content container? I mean, saying "I avoid medium" sounds like saying "I avoid wordpress" or "I avoid blogspot", speaking of content quality and not look&feel. About this one, I'm logged in, so I have to suppose your % (25% and 10%) don't apply to the logged-in case, also because as soon as I scroll down, all those frills disappears and there's only the text.

It's a content container. A content container that for some of us is now stereotyped as "content in here is often low-quality", which means that in the vast amount of content on offer each day we're more likely to skip links leading to medium.com. If people regularly spread bad blogspot links around, blogspot would have the same reputation. (I'm sure there is tons of spam on blogspot, but when people share blogspot links in my circles they usually are blogs by people that have been at it for ages and care more about content than appearances, so for me blogspot is a high-quality signal)

Being in a known content container is great if you don't have your own "brand" and as long as people associate the container with good content. If they don't, or if your content is way above average, it pulls you down (which provides motivation for below-average writers to write on them, hiding in the crowd, and motivation for good writers to leave)

Re: REST is the new SOAP

#316

Post by goostavos »

bvrmn wrote: post #148
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? REST is not popular, there are only a few RESTful public API in the wild. The rest (unavoidable pun, sorry) are simple HTTP APIs with JSON serialization which maps with various degree of coupling to internal data layer. The main cause you don't need REST limitations to achieve same goals. OP has strong opinion about why we need to reimplement rpc over http every time for every application an…

Link to these "actual" RESTful public APIs?

I've been curious to see one (for years). Everyone talks about how this REST service is being done wrong, but few will link to services being done "right".

Re: REST is the new SOAP

#317

Post by gozur88 »

felipelemos wrote: post #38
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…

And REST is easier to debug. This make a huge difference when you have a big and complex system.

The nice thing about SOAP was it had a full-fledged type system built in. REST is certainly easier to debug, but it's also more likely you'll be required to debug it, since many of the problems you'll run into in a REST interface would have been caught at compile time with SOAP.

SOAP's big problem, IMO, was the crazy insistence on URI formatted namespaces, which took a simple XML message and turned it into something bloated and confusing.

Re: REST is the new SOAP

#318

Post by mrisoli »

shintakezou wrote: post #314
DarkCrusader2 wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I avoid medium posts as much as possible. Everyone is an expert on there with very strong opinions telling me how every technology older than 2 years and not written in javascript is obsolete/dead/not the right way/new . And what's with the UI on their publications. They take up top 25% of the screen with the branding and navbar and bottom 10% asking me to sign in and both sticks on the screen. Who approved that?

Isn't it just a content container? I mean, saying "I avoid medium" sounds like saying "I avoid wordpress" or "I avoid blogspot", speaking of content quality and not look&feel. About this one, I'm logged in, so I have to suppose your % (25% and 10%) don't apply to the logged-in case, also because as soon as I scroll down, all those frills disappears and there's only the text.

It is a centralized content container, which makes click-bait titles like this one better material. So you can create a controversial opinion on a subject, get views, make it an entertaining even if exaggerate read and it gets featured among other pieces especially if you use the right popular tags, then your post is on people's medium app and newsletter subscription.

WordPress, on the other hand, is open source software you can host it yourself and thus you can't just slap some tags on it and get featured on top of a newsletter. This is also why some authors prefer medium, easy to setup and easier to get an audience, but then you have to resort to these marketing techniques to drive your views up.

Disclaimer: I have written some medium posts with catchy/controversial titles to test said techniques, call me part of the problem.

Re: REST is the new SOAP

#319

Post by 3pt14159 »

0x445442 wrote: post #180
Marazan wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Xmlrpc is simple and it works. Xmlrpc is soap without the bullshit. I built lots of personal apps that were flash/flex front ends that talked to python backends over xmlrpc to quickly whip up his for my python aps

Having implemented many web service APIs in both SOAP and REST I have the same opinion. XMLRPC or JSONRPC seem to be the happy middle ground. The posted article hit home with me as I had to re-implement working SOAP services in REST because you know, management buzzwords and new shiny. I quickly found, as the article articulates, as soon as you enter the land of verbs and workflows REST starts to stumble and becomes…

But you can with REST. Most of this conversation is a strawman against REST. Creating or changing resources can impact other resources. It's obvious / logical. Responses can include the things that they impacted along the way. Much of this thread amounts to "I used this shitty REST API once" or similar for RPC.

Re: REST is the new SOAP

#320

Post by 0x445442 »

3pt14159 wrote: post #319
0x445442 wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Having implemented many web service APIs in both SOAP and REST I have the same opinion. XMLRPC or JSONRPC seem to be the happy middle ground. The posted article hit home with me as I had to re-implement working SOAP services in REST because you know, management buzzwords and new shiny. I quickly found, as the article articulates, as soon as you enter the land of verbs and workflows REST starts to stumble and becomes…

But you can with REST. Most of this conversation is a strawman against REST. Creating or changing resources can impact other resources. It's obvious / logical. Responses can include the things that they impacted along the way. Much of this thread amounts to "I used this shitty REST API once" or similar for RPC.

Well, it depends on how you reckon REST. I can assure you the real world issues I've run into don't have anything to do with the frameworks used. The impedance mismatch between what one would consider a sane API that could just as easily be implemented as a compiled library and the mappings of that API to HTTP verbs and what is considered proper REST were where the problems were.

My question would be, outside of convenience to SPA developers, what do you see as the specific advantages to REST over XML/JSON RPC or SOAP?

Post reply on HN