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What I'm Up to Now

martinfowler.com

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Re: What I'm Up to Now

#121

Post by mikevm »

tinco wrote: post #115
ramraj07 wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Someone please help here, im reading all the links here and still drawing a blank on what is and is not REST! Can someone link to an API that’s truly RESTful? And perhaps one that’s barely not?

REST has 6 constraints, the 6th constraint has 4 elements, the last of those four is a useless thing called HATEOAS. If you call your API REST, some zealots will open up your API and look if your beautiful response is polluted with any "links". If it is instead pristine, they will claim your API is not REST. It's really ridiculous, the links system is only barely useful in some GUI data exploration tools, that are no…

I think HATEOAS is basically requiring a client that looks a lot like a web browser. Which is no surprise, since Fielding is basically describing the way the web works. This is not necessarily a good prescription for APIs manipulated by code and not humans.

Re: What I'm Up to Now

#122

Post by mikevm »

gighjifews wrote: post #44

Somewhat flippant, but also a serious question - do people like Martin Fowler and uncle bob actually do anything or do they just describe systems that do not (and probably will never) actually exist? Have they built real world software, or do they just describe some ideal state that has never actually occurred in reality - some kind of geek porn? I’d much rather listen to people who have actually done things than peo…

Frankly, Bob Martin (let's stop calling him "uncle", please) is a joke. He has a very expensive lecture series called Clean Coders which is goofy, quirky, annoying, and just a plain waste of time and money. He wears goofy costumes, rambles on about irrelevant things and has too many jump cuts. He also peddles things based on zero actual hard evidence... pure opinion.

Re: What I'm Up to Now

#123

Post by currywurst »

I have no idea which side of the bed HN woke up today, but the comments here disparaging Martin Fowler's body of work really trouble me.

I really enjoy Martin's (and more recently his collaborators') blog posts on various trends. More often than not, they distill key concerns and references into a quickly readable summary. His books on software patterns collect a breadth of problem/solution pairs that have now been baked into so many frameworks that you probably don't even realise you are benefiting from them.

If you are totally new to Martin Fowler's books and writing, I would urge you to not brush them aside because of some snide comments on HN. There's a wealth of material that can surely enrich your thinking.

Re: What I'm Up to Now

#124

Post by recursivedoubts »

mikevm wrote: post #120
recursivedoubts wrote: post #40

Martin, if you are reading this, here's something you could do: Revisit REST (and the Richardson Maturity Model[1]) and explain why REST has failed so spectacularly in the JSON API world. It's worth doing because REST-ful hypermedia systems are using an interesting and distinctive network model, and most younger web engineers don't know much about it and end up using the client-server approaches that have become so c…

He can start by actually developing a major (non-toy) application using HATEOAS and then once we all marvel at his success, we might consider doing things this way. To me, HATEOAS always seemed like it wants me to basically re-invent the web browser. You know, the fact that basically no one does things this way may give you a hint on how actually useful it is.

HATEOAS doesn't want you to reinvent the web browser.

HATEOAS is describing how the browser and HTML works.

It was the JSON API folks who (inappropriately) appropriated REST terminology that made folks feel like they had to shoehorn that concept into what is really RPC.

Re: What I'm Up to Now

#125

Post by randomdata »

voiceofunreason wrote: post #107
ramraj07 wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Someone please help here, im reading all the links here and still drawing a blank on what is and is not REST! Can someone link to an API that’s truly RESTful? And perhaps one that’s barely not?

REST is the architectural style of the World Wide Web: browsers reading cached copies of web pages that link to other web pages. So almost any site you hit with your browser is a "RESTful API". Another decent example is Atom Syndication / Atom Publishing. The best introduction that I've found is Jim Webber's 2011 talk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aQVSzMV8DWc&t=3m8s Jon Moore's 2010 Hypermedia APIs talk is also goo…

> So almost any site you hit with your browser is a "RESTful API".

I said something to that effect in a job interview once when the topic of REST came up. I was looked at like I had two heads.

Re: What I'm Up to Now

#126

Post by sillysaurusx »

58x14 wrote: post #56
sillysaurusx wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The feeling never really goes away. For me at least. I just accidentally raised $1,931 yesterday for Tensorfork Labs, a non-profit I started ... also yesterday. https://twitter.com/theshawwn/status/1431462744906141696 I was blown away that everyone suddenly offered so much support. We have people filling out notion docs ( http://wiki.tensorfork.com/ ) and an active Google Chat chatroom with 12 interesting people in i…

Hey, congratulations and great job! I find there's a perpetual equilibrium between feeling confident in your output / yourself, and recognizing that much of what you do will likely be incomplete, messy, sub-optimal. This seems to be a fundamental part of being human as it extends across all types of creation. Authors have stream-of-consciousness to overcome writers' block. Athletes get the 'yips'. Developers have pro…

I emailed you to thank you for the wonderful reply. (And my regrets that I didn't see your question in time.)

Re: What I'm Up to Now

#127

Post by majewsky »

itwy wrote: post #53
dang wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No personal attacks on HN, please.

I don't see it that way. He chose to be the brand.

Even so, you should provide some evidence to back up your claim. If you said "Fowler is the master of overcomplicating things, like in his work on A, or when he argued B", then people could engage with those instances or provide counterexamples. As it stands, your original comment is just flamebait.

Re: What I'm Up to Now

#128

Post by majewsky »

jnwatson wrote: post #31
seibelj wrote: post #2

Martin Fowler has been a big advocate of micro services. I think micro services has been one of the biggest mistakes ever promulgated on software development and is responsible for developer misery, un-productivity, failed projects, and unintelligible rats nests that have set back a generation of engineers who have to now unlearn all of this nonsense. I can’t take him seriously and he is forever tainted in my mind. H…

Microservices are the simplest solution to counteract Conway's law. If you have two organizations writing software, the least-overhead organizational approach that allows minimum communication overhead and release coordination is for both of those organizations to release a package and have well-defined APIs between those. There are certainly other approaches to achieve similar outcomes, but microservices are the low…

> Microservices are the simplest solution to counteract Conway's law.

I don't think that "counteract" is a useful frame of mind. I interpret Conway's Law more as a lesson: Build your software to reflect your org chart, or else you're going to have a really bad time. If you have two loosely-coupled teams, their respective services better be loosely coupled as well. And vice versa for tightly-coupled teams: If you have some good cross-team communication going on, take advantage of it in your architecture.

Re: What I'm Up to Now

#129

Post by mikevm »

recursivedoubts wrote: post #124
mikevm wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He can start by actually developing a major (non-toy) application using HATEOAS and then once we all marvel at his success, we might consider doing things this way. To me, HATEOAS always seemed like it wants me to basically re-invent the web browser. You know, the fact that basically no one does things this way may give you a hint on how actually useful it is.

HATEOAS doesn't want you to reinvent the web browser. HATEOAS is describing how the browser and HTML works. It was the JSON API folks who (inappropriately) appropriated REST terminology that made folks feel like they had to shoehorn that concept into what is really RPC.

Yes, but there were some people that were pushing HATEOAS for APIs. I think the fact that pretty much no one does it is good enough evidence to see that it's just not a good fit. HATEOAS is good for web sites and human operators, but not for APIs being executed by software.

Re: What I'm Up to Now

#130

Post by abraxas »

solarengineer wrote: post #108
abraxas wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Rational Unified Process. Let's start right here.

(Disclosure: I'm at Thoughtworks, but my opinions are my own. In fact, we're so broadly dispersed across the world that we can't claim to represent a "Thoughtworks" opinion). Did you mean his writing here (2005): https://martinfowler.com/articles/newMethodology.html#ration... ?

he peddles whatever is the fad du jour. Back in 2001/2003 when the RUP was at its peak cycle Fowler made a number of posts and talks praising its virtues.
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