Programming @programming.dev Kissaki @programming.dev 1w ago

How Did REST Come To Mean The Opposite of REST? | htmx

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Web Development @programming.dev Kissaki @programming.dev 1w ago

htmx.org /essays/how-did-rest-come-to-mean-the-opposite-of-rest/

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This is sorta funny for me because as a non cs major who went into it it seems like all the api's I work with are called rest apis and I was always wondering what a non rest api would be.
- SOAP, which is basically dead, or GraphQL.
  
  Hahaha, don't underestimate jank ass vendor systems. My workplace has at least one business critical thing using SOAP. We've been spinning our wheels on deprecating the damn thing for three years.
  
  see. now I have seen references to soap but never really got that to. when it comes down to it my biggest concern is things just work.
This is all very “old man yells at cloud”.

Interesting historical note, but things change.
- I'd Agree in most cases, but not in this one.
  
  Rigor in definitions allows us to express a lot of complex things in a compact form. this allows us to treat "Cars" as something different than "Motorcycles" while both a motorized vehicles.
  
  the same is true for REST-API and other API-Types, while all of them are just a means to allow services to exchange data, they tell us a lot about how this exchange happens and what to expect, but only if we use the words in a way that they represent the concept they were meant to represent. Otherwise we end up with meaningless buzz words like "rest", "agile", "scrum", "artificial intelligence" and so forth, instead of meaningful terms found in the jargon of other engineering disciplines like "magnetism", "gravity" or "motor".
  
  We're well past that. I would probably care more if the original idea behind REST solved a real problem, but it doesn't. It's architecture astronaut stuff.
  
  If REST is just about using HTTP verbs and status codes smarter, and sending the payload in JSON, I'm good to leave it at that. It's useful.
  
  Rigor in definitions allows us to express a lot of complex things in a compact form. this allows us to treat "Cars" as something different than "Motorcycles" while both a motorized vehicles.
  
  Meh. There's plenty of room in the gray zone between "car" and "motorcycle" where things like this or this can exist. The botanical world has worked very hard to create rigorous definitions of fruits and vegetables only to be completely ignored by cooks. The culinary world in general has done just fine for centuries without rigorously specifying whether taco's are sandwiches and cereal is a soup.
  
  As long as it is generally understood what people mean by a word when they use it everything will be mostly fine. REST is an understood term, whether the inventor of the term meant something else by it is immaterial.
- A cargo cult doesn’t change airplanes by building mock runways - they rather miss the point entirely.

14 comments