How Did REST Come to Mean the Opposite of REST?
1–10 of 13 posts
Re: How Did REST Come to Mean the Opposite of REST?
#2To me this is gif vs gif. The populous has shifted in a direction the originator didn’t intend, but it’s the populous that use it.
RESTful to me is HTTP calls with PUT/PATCH/GET/DELETE and whatever else I am missing. The return doesn’t need to be json but needs to be structured so XML, JSON, etc
Re: How Did REST Come to Mean the Opposite of REST?
#3To me this is gif vs gif. The populous has shifted in a direction the originator didn’t intend, but it’s the populous that use it. RESTful to me is HTTP calls with PUT/PATCH/GET/DELETE and whatever else I am missing. The return doesn’t need to be json but needs to be structured so XML, JSON, etc
this is explained in the article... referred to as Level 2 of Richard Maturity Model.
"Everyone stopped at Level 2 of the RMM"
Re: How Did REST Come to Mean the Opposite of REST?
#4Agile definitely means the opposite of agile.
Re: How Did REST Come to Mean the Opposite of REST?
#5To me this is gif vs gif. The populous has shifted in a direction the originator didn’t intend, but it’s the populous that use it. RESTful to me is HTTP calls with PUT/PATCH/GET/DELETE and whatever else I am missing. The return doesn’t need to be json but needs to be structured so XML, JSON, etc
Part of the nomenclature problem here is that there's no other way to refer to an HTTP-based API. REST was originally an alternative to the horrible SOAP. I'd be fine with calling it something else (because the author is right, nobody's following Fielding's vision), but there's nothing else to call it.
Re: How Did REST Come to Mean the Opposite of REST?
#6The terminology confusion was too difficult to resolve.
"REST" became associated with a good API design, so when people were told their API isn't a real REST, they interpreted it as having to implement more of Roy Fielding's vision to make it a really good API.
"Real REST must be self-describing hypermedia!" sounded like "you have to add more hyperlinks and delete your API docs", which of course didn't make any sense when you already had a thick RPC client (and RPC may have been the right architecture for the API).
"RESTful" was too similar to be a term for the opposite of the original REST, so it was too easy to interpret the issue as a technical criticism of "RESTful" being weak and falling short of fully-featured ideal "REST" rather than a terminology problem of the same term used for two valid but opposite architectural approaches.
The other term used at that time was AJAX ("async JS and XML"), which made even less sense for the "sync PHP and JSON" APIs (Node.js didn't exist yet).
Re: How Did REST Come to Mean the Opposite of REST?
#7To me this is gif vs gif. The populous has shifted in a direction the originator didn’t intend, but it’s the populous that use it. RESTful to me is HTTP calls with PUT/PATCH/GET/DELETE and whatever else I am missing. The return doesn’t need to be json but needs to be structured so XML, JSON, etc
Part of the nomenclature problem here is that there's no other way to refer to an HTTP-based API. REST was originally an alternative to the horrible SOAP. I'd be fine with calling it something else (because the author is right, nobody's following Fielding's vision), but there's nothing else to call it.
The author suggests RESTless.
Re: How Did REST Come to Mean the Opposite of REST?
#8Before REST gained mind share, developing for the web was effectively templating. Vanilla PHP, Java server pages, Django, Rails, etc all had this idea that business logic would be transformed server-side into complete web pages by injecting variables into HTML.
REST came along and tried to put some discipline around this. The URLs now mattered and had semantic meaning! All the self-describing hypertext stuff was interesting but largely ignored.
That one point - giving URLs noun-like semantics - led to the realization that the return mimetype could be anything. We could treat the website like a database and fetch raw information from it.
The only thing REST and JSON HTTP Apis have in common is that they agree URLs should have semantics. REST sorta opened peoples eyes to that fact... and the term was incorrectly adopted to describe everything that came after.
Re: How Did REST Come to Mean the Opposite of REST?
#9Before REST gained mind share, developing for the web was effectively templating. Vanilla PHP, Java server pages, Django, Rails, etc all had this idea that business logic would be transformed server-side into complete web pages by injecting variables into HTML. REST came along and tried to put some discipline around this. The URLs now mattered and had semantic meaning! All the self-describing hypertext stuff was inte…
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Re: How Did REST Come to Mean the Opposite of REST?
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