Why REST Sucks

http://vmrcre.org/web/scribe/home/-/blogs/why-rest-sucks

by icedchai • 8 years ago

66 87 8 years ago

maxxxxx• 8 years ago

I tend to agree. I have worked now with a few REST APIs and it seems none of them implemented REST well. Just adding verbs like "delete" or "get" to the URL feels better to me compared to using HTTP verbs.

batoure3• 8 years ago

I think this is a version of the right answer. I would love to see someone do a teardown of all of the Best in class REST interfaces. Because the reality is some of the systems that get pointed to as most robust and we'll designed generally all contain a place where they have heavily skewed from the standard.

All that being said I think REST is an architectural pattern that can bring some order to the chaos. And I have seen thought experiments experiments that embrace it's constraints bring significant performance enhancements to many a system.

munk-a5• 8 years ago

I've worked with systems that use RESTish patterns purely for request pattern conformity, eschewing any of the auto-discovery portions. I've found that reliance on verbs for noun modification with some separate action verbs builds a system that is very clean to interact with but... it's all in the details, there are plenty of terrible RESTish systems out there and there are some wonderful systems built on alternate patterns (like XML RPC).

I think the one thing RESTish design can bring is a simplification to the communication layer, but if you're interacting with it through HTML forms then you'll need hacks to get it working in the first place (many HTTP verbs are not supported as methods by most browsers).

Basically, it's an additional tool with some value for organization, if you use it zealously you can waste years of labour building a perfectly RESTful system. Do what works for you.

crooked-v• 8 years ago

Well, it means that I can easily program all my web services to accept both GET and POST (normally without changing any of my server side code, to seamlessly accept either)

...unless you've got more params than can fit into the de facto URL length limits of browsers (~2K characters for Internet Explorer), in which case you're stuck with POST.

pdonis2• 8 years ago

Or if the request has side effects, which GET requests are not supposed to per the HTTP RFCs.

ArchTypical• 8 years ago

RFCs are often useful guidelines, but don't get too hung up on them. There are always side effects. eg resource usage, interaction effects (cache priming), etc.

[Edit:] > The point is that GET is not supposed to change the information stored on the server side.

The RFCs for HTTP USAGE are guidelines that are less about utility and more of an interoperability dream that was never realized. There's nothing sancrosanct about them. There have been DECADES of usage contrary (eg medical, gamedev, advertising, ERP, etc). At some point people realize it's bikeshedding issue that's more trouble than it's worth.

ppeetteerr• 8 years ago

I'm not sure what upset this Mr. Graffittis so much, but he seems to be excessively angry with HTTP verbs . Anyway, thousands of developers have found ways around this problem. Here is one:

Most people use GET for retrieval, POST to change system state and DELETE to delete an object. You might go crazy and experiment with PUT, or not, your choice.

As a team, you can establish some easy rules too (e.g. is it books/1 or books/book/1 to query a single book?).

Sure, REST is not going to answer every problem, but no standard ever does. Standards are meant as guidelines (esp. those related to naming conventions like REST). Have fun with it. Stop the hate.

batoure3• 8 years ago

You can really implement anything under any verb... Given the flexibility of http as a standard.

I have always hoped to some day stumble across some madlad who scales a large production system on the back of DELETE

Although sadly browsers are starting to enforce the behaviors of verbs more and more...

Someone hurry up and get coding

shados3• 8 years ago

not nearly as bad, but I've worked at a company that tried really hard to be as pure REST as possible, closely following the http semantics for everything... except they used POST for idempotent actions and PUT for the non-idempotent ones.

That was....confusing on my first week.

munk-a5• 8 years ago

It isn't prevented but... it's like developing in an esoteric language, if your language interpreted any inequality as a test if the left hand value is lesser than the right hand value (i.e. 2 < 3 equivalent to 2 > 3, both are true) you _can_ work within it, but why bother. Use the common language constructs and design paradigms other people do unless you enjoy making it hellishly difficult to train up new people.

philwelch11• 8 years ago

(disclaimer: TFA is dead for me right now so I might be speaking out of context)

REST (like "object-oriented programming") is an ambiguous term that might refer to a reasonable and usable subset of behavior, or it might refer to a more extensive hypermedia-style design pattern.

REST, in the hypermedia sense, and in the sense of "the design principles behind HTTP in the first place", is a good way for a server to expose data to an intelligent human-guided client (i.e. a web browser). It doesn't do a lot for the API case, but it does a little and there's enough tooling to get you the rest of the way.

I usually don't even think of REST API's as RESTful. I think of them as RPCs that exchange JSON, except you define the RPC endpoint as an HTTP verb/URL pattern tuple, accept and treat as a contract the standards behind different verbs, use response codes for out-of-band metadata, and piggyback on all the tooling and infrastructure that people already built around serving HTTP to web browsers in the first place. If you want to strongly type your RPC, you can use OpenAPI. If you want to define your RPC ahead of time and then generate server and/or client code from a definition, you can use Swagger Codegen. There's enough adequate tooling that you don't necessarily need to resort to an actual RPC protocol, but that doesn't mean your REST API actually has to be RESTful in any meaningful way, or even that it should be.

weberc2• 8 years ago

is a good way for a server to expose data to an intelligent human-guided client (i.e. a web browser)

A web-browser doesn't have any concept of REST; it only provides a sandbox for the client code which knows how to map paths to data (but pretty much never does so by means of any sort of introspection). Note that this isn't advocating against REST or in favor of RPC, just a neutral observation.

geezerjay7• 8 years ago

REST (like "object-oriented programming") is an ambiguous term

It really isn't. There's a whole doctoral thesis describing in detail what REST is and what it is supposed to achieve.

nicc• 8 years ago

What about PATCH?

I personally like PUT even for delta updates, but a dev I was working with was obsessed with wanting PATCH.

jgalentine007• 8 years ago

I like put for updates and patch for partial updates (but without the command/diff structure - only fields that are provided are patches)

geezerjay7• 8 years ago

Your colleague was right: put is for total object replacement and patch is for partial object update. The guiding principle is:

* POST: create new object, including their primary keys. Run appropriate sanity checks.

* PUT: extract old entity object and update all attributes and dependencies, possibly deleting and regenerating all dependencies while preserving the object's keys.

* PATCH: extract old entity object and update a small subset of its attributes. Run sanity checks that are specific to this form of update, and avoid touching bits in the persistence layer that are not linked with the update.

Put is very important because total entity replacements really don't replace the role of partial updates, particularly if we consider how extensive transactions can become.

rhacker• 8 years ago

Personally I think GraphQL's existence, while seemingly blatantly obvious in retrospect, is was what REST should have been. It lets "generic" applications to discover the API and its associated operations. Essentially its also simply a re-do of what Swagger (and a few others) attempted to do, but never really made REST work (imho).

Here's a good analogy:

Graphql is docker, REST is LXC.

chewbacha• 8 years ago

Might be more accurate to say that SOAP is LXC and GraphQL is docker.

romeisendcoming• 8 years ago

So one is user configurable and understandable (leaves much to the user) and the other is a black box that performs magic? One takes some time to understand and make work while the other just does the right thing 85% of the time?

danellis• 8 years ago

As a team, you can establish some easy rules too (e.g. is it books/1 or books/book/1 to query a single book?).

That's the thing about REST; you don't need any rules about what paths look like, because you shouldn't be constructing them manually. You get them from the State that was Transferred to you.

coldtea• 8 years ago

I'm not sure what upset this Mr. Graffittis so much, but he seems to be excessively angry with HTTP verbs

One thing that upsets me is pop psychology and second guessing of emotions (about "being upset", "excessively angry", etc) instead of arguments.

Have fun with it.

Engineering is not about having arbitrary fun with whatever "standard" we are given.

teen• 8 years ago

RPC is the way to live

crescentfresh• 8 years ago

Does this mean POST for every request?

bonsai80• 8 years ago

It can, but doesn't even have to be done via HTTP.

philwelch11• 8 years ago

Not for me; I'm willing to use GET for an RPC that's more GET-ey and DELETE for an RPC that's more DELETE-ey.

Arzh• 8 years ago

`We went from Procedural Programming, to Object Oriented Programming, to Functional Programming`

I mean, it's not really a progression; even inside of OO and Procedural there are a lot of differences and it's not like any of those are better than the other, they just allow you to write code that does the same thing in different ways.

gweinberg• 8 years ago

"You know they try to eat non-mushy peas balanced on the backs of their forks!" Is that true? Why would anyone do that?

thinkingkong• 8 years ago

I'd love to hear from the folks at Slack to see how their initial API design decisions scaled. Their model is pretty clean and I really like the look and feel of it, aesthetically at least it's RPC-ish.

Part of the challenge when people have arguments like this is that they aren't experiencing the trade-offs in the other directions they'd like to go, so it would be great to hear the concerns about an RPC alternative which restricts the HTTP verbs to GET & POST.

interesthrow22• 8 years ago

It sucks because it's not a spec, that's all. HTTP is, GraphQL is. When implementing GraphQL either you follow the spec or it is not GraphQL. Same for HTTP. An vague idea shouldn't be the basis for architectural choices and I'm glad REST and its legacy are now criticized and contested.

tabtab• 8 years ago

I've found it's best to let other organizations be the guinea pigs and get the kinks out, or disprove it, before our own org adopts it. Too many get carried away with "new ideas" and dive in the deep-end blindfolded. Let it run "five years in a similar organization" is my time-proven rule of thumb. Unfortunately, I lack rank to enforce this rule.

paulddraper2• 8 years ago

I assume your criticism applies to OO? Or functional programming? Or event sourcing? Or any number of programming concepts without a "standard"?

interesthrow22• 8 years ago

I assume your criticism applies to OO? Or functional programming? Or event sourcing? Or any number of programming concepts without a "standard"?

Don't assume anything, I never talked about OO, or functional programming, or event sourcing or any number of programming concepts without a "standard". Don't make up things in an attempt to further whatever point you are trying to make here. I never talked about those things and don't care about them.

daxfohl3• 8 years ago

Main problem is that most of the frameworks out there are REST / noun based, because it's easier to scaffold. Are there any that are more rpc/post/verb based out of the box?

philwelch11• 8 years ago

Basically any HTTP microframework that has a minimum of ceremony between "declare HTTP URL endpoint" and "write function that handles requests to that endpoint". Flask, Sinatra, anything like that.

Or, you could use swagger-codegen and generate your service from a handwritten OpenAPI spec.

daxfohl3• 8 years ago

Basically agree, but was thinking more about something with a scaffold that specifically guides users toward a separation of actions and nouns, not just an indifference.

striking• 8 years ago

PostgREST will generate a swagger spec for you from a database schema.

crazygringo• 8 years ago

This seems like an... unnecessarily angry... bit of a rant.

BUT, I tend to agree. Just use GET for all requests that don't change things, and POST for those that do (important so spiders and pre-caching don't inadvertently take actions), and put everything else (including what the real verb is) in the URL or parameters.

The idea of trying to shoehorn your logic into additional PUT and DELETE verbs is unnecessary and makes it harder to use/support (e.g. HTTP forms don't support those verbs).

And... that's it. Fortunately I've never had to work with a die-hard REST evangelist, so maybe I've never had to feel the anger or frustration this post must be coming from...

amaccuish• 8 years ago

Wayback link if it's not loading for anyone else: https://web.archive.org/web/20181217220412/vmrcre.org/web/sc...

leeoniya2• 8 years ago

looks like the site's being hugged to death.

nevertheless, i've had many annoying situations where i want to GET a specific list of ids, eg. /orders?ids=1235678,abcdefg and quickly run into the 2048 char limit, forcing me to design the API as a POST in all cases. combine that with additional sorting, grouping and filtering params and you're stuck.

the fact that GET is conflated with the url and has no body to pass params in is very limiting. at that point, HTTP verbs become mostly pointless.

tuespetre2• 8 years ago

When do you need to get a list like that where they couldn’t be collectively addressed by some other resource identifier? If we treat our “REST APIs” as generic database interfaces instead of equipping them with more semantics, of course we hit that wall.

leeoniya2• 8 years ago

if a user selects a bunch of options and records in the interface and then wants to pull an aggregate report on specific items which would translate into some AND id IN (...).

what if you need to delete a bunch of specific records in a single HTTP request with REST? you're fucked. DELETE is designed to deal with one record at a time [1]. sure, DELETE could have a body, but the recommendation is to ignore it [2].

to operate on multiple specific records, you're stuck doing at least 2 requests. a POST that asks the server to create some temporary "collection" record. and then use the new URI of that collection to perform more operations. why do all this overhead when you can just do the delete operation with a POST request and a body filled with record ids?

i could continue, but it should be obvious that REST was designed with the server as the center of the universe. when trying to shoehorn this worldview into modern fat clients and high-perf SPAs, it very quickly falls down.

[1] https://www.restapitutorial.com/lessons/httpmethods.html#del...

[2] https://stackoverflow.com/questions/299628/is-an-entity-body...

daxfohl3• 8 years ago

It becomes more clear to me in the context of api versioning. You rev the action, not the data. REST versioning makes it look like like you're versioning the data. Sure you can explain it away, but it smells not right.

k__• 8 years ago

Using GraphQL somehow lead me to not worrying about all that low level REST stuff anymore.

I define my schema, sprinkle some directives and push it to AppSync.

revskill• 8 years ago

REST sucks because there're many ways to do something. Consider RPC, if you want to do something, you make an endpoint /doSomething, that's all, no need to mess around with combination of [http methods][noun(s)]([business method])

cztomsik• 8 years ago

the worst thing about REST is that nobody agrees on what it is...

otherwise it's pretty fine, you just need to find a good server-side framework with proper tooling (springfox for java, nest.js for node) so that you don't need to write documentation (and test-console) yourself

graphql is great if all what you want to do is to publish some data but once you need more updates or predictable performance, it's not so easy anymore, and this is not just my opinion

dsego3• 8 years ago

Nobody except Roy Fielding.

tuespetre2• 8 years ago

Obligatory link to Fielding’s nearly decade-old blog post, “It is okay to use POST”:

https://roy.gbiv.com/untangled/2009/it-is-okay-to-use-post

The ‘recall’ and ‘sendpromotion’ ‘actions’ are still resources: ‘the resource that does a recall’ and ‘the resource that sends a promotion.’ You don’t ‘GET’ them or ‘DELETE’ them or ‘PUT’ something in their place. You just send a request that triggers those resources to do their thing: ‘POST’. It’s not CRUD and it’s 100% valid.

psadauskas• 8 years ago

Not to be too snarky, but this is just another "I did REST poorly and it didn't work very well, so I guess REST sucks" post.

Most of the other gripes have been responded to, but I wanted to add a comment about the "stateless" part: Its not that your Application is stateless, its the HTTP protocol itself that is. It is a contrast to other contemporary protocols like FTP or SMTP, in which you establish a connection and then perform "Commands", the order of which matters. In FTP, if you do:

    CONNECT ftp.example
    CD public
    GET myfile.jpg

The `CD` command in Line 2 changes the behavior of the `GET` in Line 3. This different from HTTP in that each request is independent of any others. The "state" is that the FTP server has to "remember" the current working directory of each connected client. If there were need for a high-availability load-balanced FTP provider that could support tens or hundreds of thousands of simultaneous connections, it would be pretty difficult because you'd have to maintain that state across all the servers. On the other hand, the stateless nature of HTTP means we can have Proxies and Load Balancers and CDNs all over the planet, and it mostly just works.

sopooneo2• 8 years ago

So are session cookies allowed?

restdoesnotsuck• 8 years ago

The author's main beef in this article are the more exotic HTTP verbs. I don't think that gets at the crux of why REST sucks for Web Services/APIs.

The core problem is that REST (which, recall is a description of the web architecture) requires HATEOAS. JSON doesn't naturally implement a hypertext in the way that HTML does and, further, the other end of a JSON call is almost certainly code, rather than a human, and thus isn't able to take advantage of this feature anyway.

Here are a few articles on this general idea:

http://intercoolerjs.org/2016/01/18/rescuing-rest.html

http://intercoolerjs.org/2016/05/08/hatoeas-is-for-humans.ht...

droussel4• 8 years ago

I've designed and implemented a few REST api over the years that both made use of json for resource representations and also used hyperlinks. You do need to create your own media types and document them properly though, but media types and relations are at the core of any good REST APIs.

teliskr• 8 years ago

I'm not trying to go out of my way to be snarky... BUT I find it funny that someone writing about why a technology sucks; can't manage to keep their blog online.

REST is simple, simple is good. It's not perfect for everything, but it has served my purposes well for many years.

droussel4• 8 years ago

I hate it when people criticizes something they do not understand properly in the first place... Is it so hard to read Roy's thesis and do some proper research?

paulddraper2• 8 years ago

Sigh. Site down.

Archive link https://web.archive.org/web/20181028175819/http://vmrcre.org...

In 2018 with gigs of RAM, super fast internet, and billions of Hertz, it seems like more the web should be "web scale" than it is.

madmaniak• 8 years ago

Article doesn't loads for me. Whatever is said, the answer is simple. REST was meant to be used by other applications in a not yet known way, and many where claiming REST is a "best practice" for API of YOUR single page application. It led to doing the same thing in a huge scope twice - selecting, modelling, and preparing for view of data, maybe even more. So we didn't use the context of the query which already shapes the data. GraphQL does. But GraphQL sucks in other way - as it adds unnecessary querying language (which already exists on the backend and it's for sure more powerful), and it makes a query on the frontend which is a security issue (which you can limit on the backend, but it's just a consequence of this mistake and still leaky).

Why REST Sucks

Related Stories