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How did REST come to mean the opposite of REST?

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Re: How did REST come to mean the opposite of REST?

#71

Post by cgrealy »

Marazan wrote: post #19
number6 wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Different layers: the call to the api was successful on the transport Layer, thus 200. You messed up something in the business logic or you asked for a resource that's not there. While often you will get a 404, this is wrong: the http call is successful. The endpoint did not vanish. You just asked for something the business end could not deliver. The Protocol is fine with your call.

There's.... There is a whole.set of status codes for exactly those things!

> There's no HTTP result code for "your request was successful but your Smart Washing Machine is out of detergent", for example.

That comes down to your definition of success. Yeah, the client successfully connected and the server read the request, but it was unable to process said request.

To my mind, that's a 500, as in the server was not able to handle the request due to a circumstances beyond the clients control.

Re: How did REST come to mean the opposite of REST?

#72

Post by trixie_ »

kelseyfrog wrote: post #66

An earnest answer? Because few people have taken the couple hours(?) and read Roy Fielding's dissertation from start to finish. The biggest likely reason for not doing so is that frankly a bunch of people simply don't care, and why should they. There's very little incentive to do so. In fact, the fewer people that do, the less of an incentive there is - there is no one can call them out on it and they can reap the re…

The dissertation is neither a specification or a standard which has led to decades long bickering of what 'REST' really is.

Edit: See how this post has zoomed to hundreds of comments in just minutes by people arguing the 'one true REST'. The situation is insufferable.

Re: How did REST come to mean the opposite of REST?

#73

Post by rapind »

prox wrote: post #41
jaaron wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is me, 100%. I've seen enough to realize that progress is largely each generation re-thinking and re-mixing the previous generation's problems. Sometimes the remix makes things better, but plenty of times, older generation look at what's being done and says, "wow, you really don't understand what this was originally intended for" and there's a pain in that misunderstanding and inefficiency, watching work get red…

The amount of people that think that insert musician here had this great original song is one of the most encountered fallacies in my daily life and online. Not only that, people tend to compare in word and concept from the newer song to the older song! “Hey wow this song from 19xx sounds just like this new song I love” No you fool, your new song sounds like the previous one :P. Causality matters!

Like the thousands of songs using Pachelbel's Canon.

Re: How did REST come to mean the opposite of REST?

#74

Post by mdaniel »

munk-a wrote: post #26

The short answer is... the web moved in a different way than expected and the useful portions of rest were preserved while other portions were jettisoned (the biggest one IMO isn't the hypertext portion (JSONs fine, it's fine ) but the self-discoverable portion - I haven't seen a self-discoverable REST API ever in the wild). Unfortunately the name REST was too awesome sounding and short - so we've never had a fork wi…

> I haven't seen a self-discoverable REST API ever in the wild

I'm super cognizant this entire discussion hinges upon semantics, nuance, etc but the Okta API isn't terrible about that

https://developer.okta.com/docs/reference/core-okta-api/#hyp...

I haven't personally tried `curl https://${yourOktaDomain}/api/v1` to see what the bootstrapping process looks like, but I can attest they do return _links in a bunch of their resource responses, and I believe their own SDK uses them, so they're not just lip service

Re: How did REST come to mean the opposite of REST?

#75

Post by wwweston »

ocimbote wrote: post #9

I feel old for I have witnessed many of these battles. But I feel that I have seen history. There's nothing wrong in this article, in the sense that everything's correct and right. But it is an old person's battle (figuratively, no offense to the author intended, I'm that old person sometimes). It would be like your grandparents correcting today's authors on their grammar. You may be right historically and normativel…

The descriptivist approach has a lot of merits when it comes to language -- to no small extent, words do mean what people think they mean; this is part of what it means for words to have any meaning at all, and when entire cultures let the meaning of a word drift it's hard to figure out what ground to stand on in order to say they're wrong.

And yet... right or wrong, something substantial is lost when "literally" fades into a figurative intensifier.

Same goes for REST.

There's little immediate problem in the misappropriation of the term. The problem is how few engineers spend anything more than literally zero time actually thinking about the potential merits of the original idea (and quite possibly less). Not even talking about the people who spend time thinking about it and reject it (whatever points of contention I might raise on that front), just the sheer volume of devs who sleepwalk through API engagement or design unaware of the considerations. That's the casualty to be concerned about.

Re: How did REST come to mean the opposite of REST?

#76

Post by int_19h »

derefr wrote: post #57
ocimbote wrote: post #9

I feel old for I have witnessed many of these battles. But I feel that I have seen history. There's nothing wrong in this article, in the sense that everything's correct and right. But it is an old person's battle (figuratively, no offense to the author intended, I'm that old person sometimes). It would be like your grandparents correcting today's authors on their grammar. You may be right historically and normativel…

The thing that confuses me with semantic drift, is that nobody stops at any point to make a word for what the other word used to mean. It's very hard to refer, at this point, to "the thing that people meant when they said REST ~15 years ago." Can't we just come up with another jargon term for that, that isn't being squatted on?

That's usually a sign that the thing that didn't get a new word is not actually all that useful or interesting.

Re: How did REST come to mean the opposite of REST?

#77

Post by shadowgovt »

The hidden cost of using hypermedia in REST has always been that hypermedia is machine-hostile. It has been for years.

So a format intended for machine-to-machine communication is taking on huge cost adopting a full hypermedia format for its output. Ignoring the initial question of "What version of hypermedia" (i.e. are we doing full modern HTML? Can I embed JavaScript in this response and expect the client to interpret it?), that's just overkill when 99% of the time the client and the server both understand the format of the data and don't need the supporting infrastructure a full hypermedia REST implementation provides.

For the same reasons XML-RPC more-or-less lost the fight, HTML (as a not-very-lightweight subset of XML) was going to lose the fight.

That having been said, there are some great ideas from the REST approach that can make a lot of sense with a JSON payload (such as standardizing on URLs as the way foreign resources are accessed, so your client doesn't have to interpret different references to other resources in different ways). But using HTML-on-the-wire isn't generally one of them; it's a solution looking for a problem that brings a full flotilla of problems with it.

Re: How did REST come to mean the opposite of REST?

#78

Post by fennecfoxen »

kelseyfrog wrote: post #66

An earnest answer? Because few people have taken the couple hours(?) and read Roy Fielding's dissertation from start to finish. The biggest likely reason for not doing so is that frankly a bunch of people simply don't care, and why should they. There's very little incentive to do so. In fact, the fewer people that do, the less of an incentive there is - there is no one can call them out on it and they can reap the re…

I tend to find it helpful to ask, "is this proper REST as in HATEOAS, or is just 'REST-ish'?" It's usually just REST-ish: predefined URL patterns, roughly 1:1 with specific resource-APIs; they care about your HTTP verb and return JSON (but usually not with a lot of URLs in that JSON).

Re: How did REST come to mean the opposite of REST?

#79

Post by cgrealy »

andrewstuart wrote: post #35

The details of how computers talk to each other is, or really should be, largely irrelevant. It's silly busywork all the little micromanagement of interfaces and data structures. It's plumbing. Some time in the future there will be another level of the software revolution in which alot of those details can be left to the computers themselves to work out.

Probably, but right now, it's definitely not irrelevant.

In fact, your plumbing analogy is more correct than you think. Most devs these days are connecting existing pieces together to make a system flow. We don't get paid to make the pieces, we get paid because we know how they should fit together.

Re: How did REST come to mean the opposite of REST?

#80

Post by polotics »

derefr wrote: post #57
ocimbote wrote: post #9

I feel old for I have witnessed many of these battles. But I feel that I have seen history. There's nothing wrong in this article, in the sense that everything's correct and right. But it is an old person's battle (figuratively, no offense to the author intended, I'm that old person sometimes). It would be like your grandparents correcting today's authors on their grammar. You may be right historically and normativel…

The thing that confuses me with semantic drift, is that nobody stops at any point to make a word for what the other word used to mean. It's very hard to refer, at this point, to "the thing that people meant when they said REST ~15 years ago." Can't we just come up with another jargon term for that, that isn't being squatted on?

Good point. My only idea would be to say it in-extenso: representational state transfer...
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