REST is over

The point is correct. Page 39 or 40 of the original thesis, if you get the PDF version, says that the goal of the thesis is to provide a mechanism to build hypermedia systems. This usage is key. The system that you make using REST needs to provide all of the "linking" ability within the response. It also assumes (Roy never defined what hypermedia is) that the content type is described somewhere, possibly in some standard like HTML spec.

The reason that I bring this up, and have harped on this before, is that when most people design REST they are using HTTP + JSON. The problem is that JSON is not hypermedia. Hopefully it will not become hypermedia. As a result, the systems that are HTTP + JSON are not REST. They are RESTish, but not REST.

I think that the terms really have value. That is the purpose of language. If we go about calling things that use POST or Get or PUT + JSON hypermedia, we can start to misapply the thoughts of the thesis. If we don't stick to the terms, we can not hope to properly understand the thesis' context and its fundamental goal of synthesizing lessons learned by Roy in how to design a better Internet infrastructure.

JSON is not hypermedia, but specific formats encoded as JSON can be.

To clarify, "application/json" is not REST, but "application/foaf+json" can very well be.

I have to say, the article itself was so abstract I hardly found it worth reading. I did, however, check out the book mentioned in this article. A nice paragraph from the foreword sort of defines hypermedia:

"The World Wide Web is driven by hypermedia: the ability of a document to describe its possible states, and its relationship to other documents. Hypermedia is not just a way of making websites that average people can use; it’s a new style for distributed computing, powerful and flexible."

See, this is the problem with REST: just when you think you've finally grokked it and are building RESTfully, along comes yet another hurdle hidden behind the others. You're not really RESTful unless you also do X, where X is a seemingly infinite regress of progressively more pure necessary criteria that curve toward an asymptote.

Seriously, why is it so hard to develop using a method that is supposed to make building web services easier?

Please note that I'm not trolling: I have spent the past year and a half trying really hard to build RESTful web services, I see and have experienced the benefits of this approach, and I think I've been getting progressively better at it.

I imagine he has, but hypermedia already generally means hypertext documents. JSON with some URLs in it (which I think the article means - but I'm not sure) is something very different.