That's a stupid idea. REST is built on two things: content types and resource location. The content types indicate the meaning and location of the resources, if the client does not understand the content-type, it can not do anything.
You can not "build a generic 'REST' client and point it to almost anything that is a 'REST API' and it will work", that makes no sense. Indeed, that's not what web browsers do: the driver of the API on a website is the user, not the browser.
> a REST client will never figure out /api/1/ - which is why resources go in the path and query parameters go in as, well, query parameters :)
That's completely irrelevant.
here is what my generic REST client looks like:
* HTTP[s] * JSON * Atom and RSS * Caching layer
some controller login in between all of these. I inherit this to implement simple models and controllers in the client and just tell it which resources I want (like fields in a database)
how is that not a generic client?
for twitter I have classes called users and statuses, with each method defined. for google I have similar classes. this all took minutes for me to get working - I thought that was the entire point of REST?
read the original desertion, sec. 5.2.2 connectors:
http://www.ics.uci.edu/~fielding/pubs/dissertation/rest_arch...
> if the client does not understand the content-type, it can not do anything.
generic doesn't mean understanding the payload, it means understanding the protocol
the idea is that you can build a generic 'REST' client and point it to almost anything that is a 'REST API' and it will work, in the same way we can now with web browsers
a REST client will never figure out /api/1/ - which is why resources go in the path and query parameters go in as, well, query parameters :)
from the server side you are right that modern front controllers and routing can make it all the same (heck, I can route resources to different subdomains, if I want), but a proxy does not know what the front controller logic is (ie. working backwards to what part is what).