REST – Epic Semantic Fail

Re:REST – Epic Semantic Fail by sabat on Thursday August 30, 2012 @02:22PM (#4455997)

I'm not so sure the OP's argument is substantive. I don't know whether Roy intended that his architectural style, described in his thesis, to become a loosely defined web service 'protocol', but we're not really making everything up as we go along. A well-implemented REST API is far and away simpler to understand (and easier to use) than a SOAP counterpart.

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Re:REST – Epic Semantic Fail by wanderr on Thursday August 30, 2012 @02:38PM (#4456082)

That's a bit of a false dichotomy though. SOAP is a giant turd, but it's not the only alternative out there. JSON-RPC is just as easy to understand as REST, without all the pedantry.

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Re:REST – Epic Semantic Fail by fusiongyro on Thursday August 30, 2012 @02:41PM (#4456109)

One advantage of REST, I don't know if it's especially meaningful in this context, is that RPC mechanisms encourage people to think of remote calls as local, but remote calls have a lot more failure modes than local ones do. REST keeps you aware that you're dealing with remote resources the whole time.

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Re:REST – Epic Semantic Fail by davedx on Thursday August 30, 2012 @03:10PM (#4456230)

Most of us don't worry about pedantry too much. We try to stick to best practices - just like with the rest of development we do - and get on with it.

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Re:REST – Epic Semantic Fail by sabat on Thursday August 30, 2012 @04:04PM (#4456473)

JSON-RPC is just as easy to understand as REST, without all the pedantry.

I hadn't heard of that, but it sounds exciting, partly because it's so self-explanatory.

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Re:REST – Epic Semantic Fail by alpb on Thursday August 30, 2012 @02:31PM (#4456045)

Can you elaborate "a well-implemented REST API is far and away simpler to understand" statement, please? Or do you have some examples or points that may make things clear for me? Thanks in advance.

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Re:REST – Epic Semantic Fail by arethuza on Thursday August 30, 2012 @02:37PM (#4456073)

From my own experience, a decent RESTful API is perfectly easy to use from the command line using curl. Try that with with a SOAP interface!

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Re:REST – Epic Semantic Fail by alpb on Thursday August 30, 2012 @02:44PM (#4456120)

Yeah, that's what I was thinking. I am just curious how a proper REST API looks different than Github, Stripe or other startups implemented.

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Re:REST – Epic Semantic Fail by fusiongyro on Thursday August 30, 2012 @02:50PM (#4456149)

I saw an article a while back advocating that when you hit, say, a search resource, it should return links to the next page, so, if you hit /comments/?name=alpb&perPage=10, you might get:

    <comments nextPage="/comments/?name=alpb&perPage=10&page=2">
      ...
    </comments>

There's so many ways to include results though. One way would be:

      <comment href="/comments/2398293">Text of comment</comment>

You could also do:

      <comment>/comments/2398293</comment>

There's no standard way of getting across what a link is to another resource, or where that information should go.

I don't think this is, in practice, a huge deal, because people don't write generic consumers of RESTful APIs. At some point you need to actually know what it is you're trying to do and code for it.

On top of that, with RDF or XLink or XPointer and whatnot there probably are standards for doing this kind of thing, but nobody knows them, uses them or follows them.

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Re:REST – Epic Semantic Fail by davedx on Thursday August 30, 2012 @03:11PM (#4456235)

Yup, that's HATEOAS: using hypertext to inform your clients about the state of the application (where they are, and what they can do next from this point).

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Re:REST – Epic Semantic Fail by fusiongyro on Thursday August 30, 2012 @04:42PM (#4456675)

My favorite acronym of all time.

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Re:REST – Epic Semantic Fail by jalfresi on Thursday August 30, 2012 @04:00PM (#4456447)

"There's no standard way of getting across what a link is to another resource, or where that information should go."

That doesn't quite mesh with my understanding. Some media types support hyperlinks, like HTML, which describe how links should be included (anchors, forms and link elements).

For media types that don't support hyperlinks, such as images, video etc; you can use the HTTP header Link (http://www.w3.org/wiki/LinkHeader).

Both these methods support the relationship attribute allowing you to specify the relationship between resources thus documenting the way clients should interact with such linked hypermedia (e.g. the HTML media type specifies that Link elements with the rel attribute should perform a HTTP GET request to the indicated resource).

In the example you gave, you could use a rel attribute like "comment" and link to the comments. RESTful clients could then follow the hyperlinks to the comments, knowing how to interact with them and what to do:

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Re:REST – Epic Semantic Fail by fusiongyro on Thursday August 30, 2012 @04:40PM (#4456665)

Right, but unless your resources adhere to some other standard, there's no reason why the downstream consumer would expect to find URLs in certain places or know what to do with them if they were there. Again, I don't see this as a problem, though the OP does.

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