Most RESTful APIs aren't really RESTful

https://florian-kraemer.net//software-architecture/2025/07/07/Most-RESTful-APIs-are-not-really-RESTful.html

353 541 1 year ago

It felt easier going through the post after reading these bits near the end:

The widespread adoption of a simpler, RPC-like style over HTTP can probably attributed to practical trade-offs in tooling and developer experience
Therefore, simply be pragmatic. I personally like to avoid the term “RESTful” for the reasons given in the article and instead say “HTTP” based APIs.

sublinear6• 1 year ago

Yeah but why cause needless confusion? The colloquial definition of "RESTful" is better understood as just something you defined using the OpenAPI spec. All other variants of "HTTP API" are likely hot garbage nobody wants anyway.

Zardoz84• 1 year ago

I prefer call it "REST-like" APIs

rendall3• 1 year ago

Same. And REST for short ;)

TekMol8• 1 year ago

You know what type of API I like best?

    /draw_point?x=7&y=20&r=255&g=0&b=0
    /get_point?x=7&y=20
    /delete_point?x=7&y=20

Because that is the easiest to implement, the easiest to write, the easiest to manually test and tinker with (by writing it directly into the url bar), the easiest to automate (curl .../draw_point?x=7&y=20). It also makes it possible to put it into a link and into a bookmark.

This is also how HN does it:

    /vote?id=44507373&how=up&auth=...

jaapz2• 1 year ago

This is great for API's that only have a few actions that can be taken on a given resource.

REST-API's then are especially suited for acting as a gateway to a database, to easily CRUD and fetch lists of information.

The best API's I've seen mix and match both patterns. RESTful API endpoints for data, "function call" endpoints for often-used actions like voting, bulk actions and other things that the client needs to be able to do, but you want the API to be in control of how it is applied.

TekMol8• 1 year ago

Can you give an example of an endpoint where you would prefer a "RESTful API endpoint"?

lelanthran• 1 year ago

REST-API's then are especially suited for acting as a gateway to a database, to easily CRUD and fetch lists of information.

I don't disagree, but I've found (delivering LoB applications) that they are not homogenous: The way REST is implemented, right now, makes it not especially suitable for acting as a gateway to a database.

When you're free of constraints (i.e. greenfield application) you can do better (ITO reliability, product feature velocity, etc) by not using a tree exchange form (XML or JSON).

Because then it's not just a gateway to a database, it's an ill-specified, crippled, slow, unreliable and ad-hoc ORM: it tries to map trees (objects) to tables (relations) and vice versa, with predictably poor results.

Scarblac6• 1 year ago

If you type it into the URL bar, it will use GET.

Surely you're not advocating mutating data with GET?

TekMol8• 1 year ago

What's your problem with it?

pbreit3• 1 year ago

That’s pretty bad design. Only GETs should include a querystring. Links should only read, not create, update or delete.

runeks2• 1 year ago

Only GETs should include a querystring.

Why?

wraptile• 1 year ago

I used to do that but I've been fully converted to REST and CRUD gang. Once you establish the initial routes and objects it's really easy mount everything else on it and move fast with changes. Also using tools like httpie it's super easy to test anything right in your terminal.

thaumasiotes5• 1 year ago

You're going to run into all kinds of security issues if you let GET endpoints have side effects.

h1fra• 1 year ago

Who cares, honestly? I never understood this debate; nobody has ever produced a perfect RESTful API anyway

Scarblac6• 1 year ago

UI designers want control over the look of the page in detail. E.g. some actions that can be taken on a resource are a large button and some are hidden in a menu or not rendered in the UI at all.

A client application that doesn't have any knowledge about what actions are going to be possible with a resource, instead rendering them dynamically based on the API responses, is going to make them all look the same.

So RESTful APIs as described in the article aren't useful for the most common use case of Web APIs, implementing frontend UIs.

sublinear6• 1 year ago

My experience with "RESTful APIs" rarely has much to do with the UI. Why even have any API if all you care about is the UI? Why not go back to server driven crap like DWR then?

Scarblac6• 1 year ago

My experience is that SPAs have been the way to make frontends, for the last eight years or so. May be coming to an end now. Anyway, contact with the backend all went through an API.

During that same time, the business also wanted to use the fact that our applications had an API as a selling point - our customers are pretty technical and some of them write scripts against our backends.

Backenders read about API design, they get the idea they should be REST like (as in, JSON, with different HTTP methods for CRUD operations).

And of course we weren't going to have two separate APIs, that we ran our frontends on our API was another selling point (eat your own dog food, proof that the API can do everything our frontend can, etc).

So: the UI runs on a REST API.

I'm hoping that we'll go back to Django templates with a sprinkle of HTMX here and there in the future, but who knows. That will probably be a separate backend that runs in front of this API then...

ohdeargodno3• 1 year ago

Because UI toolkit independent APIs are more flexible than just returning HTML, and considering only HTML means that you offer subpar experiences on most platforms. Not just mobile software, where web apps are awful, but also desktop, where your software doesn't integrate well with the platform if it's just a webpage.

Returning purely data means being able to transform it in any way you want, no matter where you use it. And depending on your usecase, it also means being able to sell access to it.

ivan_gammel14• 1 year ago

This is wrong on many levels.

1. UX designers operate on every stage of software development lifecycle from product discovery to post-launch support (validation of UX hypotheses), they do not exercise control - they work within constraints as part of the team. The location of a specific action in UI and interaction triggering it is orthogonal to availability of this action. Availability is defined by the state. If state restricts certain actions, UX must reflect that.

2. From architectural point of view, once you encapsulate the checking state behavior, the following will work the same way: "if (state === something)" and "if (resource.links["action"] !== null)". The latter approach will be much better, because in most cases any state-changing actions will require validation on server and you can implement the logic only once (on server).

I have been developing HATEOAS applications for quite a while and maintain HAL4J library: there are some complexities in this approach, but UI design is certainly not THE problem.

pbreit3• 1 year ago

RESTful APIs are not RESTful because REST is meh. Our APSi includes HATEAOS links and I have never, not once, witnessed their actual use (but they do double the size of response payloads).

It’s interesting that Stripe still even uses form-post on requests.

eadmund3• 1 year ago

Our APSi includes HATEAOS links and I have never, not once, witnessed their actual use (but they do double the size of response payloads).

So your payloads look like this:

    {
        "id": 1,
        "href": "http://someplace.invalid/things/1",
        "next-id": 3,
        "next-href": "http://someplace.invalid/things/3",
    }

And rather than just using next-href your clients append next-id to a hardcoded things base URL? That seems like way more work than doing it the REST way.

dewey• 1 year ago

Academically it might be correct, but shipping real features will in most cases be more important than hitting some text book definition of correctness.

eadmund3• 1 year ago

Sure, you’re right: pragmatics, in practice, are more important than theory.

But you’re assuming that there is a real contradiction between shipping features and RESTful design. I believe that RESTful design can in many cases actually increase feature delivery speed through its decoupling of clients and servers and more deeply due to its operational model.

bluGill• 1 year ago

its decoupling of clients and servers.

Notice that both of those are plural words. When you have many clients and many servers implementing a protocol a formal agreement of protocol is required. REST (which I will not claim to understand well) makes a formal agreement much easier, but you still need some agreement. However when there is just one server and just one client (I'll count all web browsers as one since the browser protocols are well defined enough) you can go faster by just implementing both sides and testing they work for a long time.

jaapz2• 1 year ago

Wasn't the entire point of calling an API RESTful, that it's explicitly not REST, but only kind of REST-like.

Also, who determined these rules are the definition of RESTful?

Pooge3• 1 year ago

RESTful means that it respects REST constraints. One is an adjective and the other a noun (like "state" and "stateless").

Also, who determined these rules are the definition of RESTful?

Roy Fielding.

leourbina• 1 year ago

This post follows the general, highly academic/dogmatic, tone that I’ve seen when certain folks talk about REST. Most of the article talks about what _not_ to do, and has very little details on how to actually do it.

The idea of having client/server decoupled via a REST api that is itself discoverable, and that allows independent deployment, seems like a great advantage.

However, the article lacks even the simplest example of an api done the “wrong” vs the “right” way. Say I have a TODO api, how do I make it so that it uses HATEOAS (also who’s coming up with these acronyms…smh)?

Overall the article comes across more as academic pontification on “what not to do” instead of actionable advice.

Valulz• 1 year ago

Agreed. I wish there was some examples to better understand what the author means. Like, in a web app, do i have any prior knowledge about the "_links" actions? Do I know that the server is going to return the actions "self" and "activate"? Is the idea to hide the routes from the user until the api call, but he should know that the api could return actions like "self", "activate" or "deactivate"? How do you communicate that an action requires a specific body? For example, the call activate is done in POST and expect a json body with a date inside. How do you tell that to the user?

HelloNurse• 1 year ago

However, the article lacks even the simplest example of an api done the “wrong” vs the “right” way.

Unless the design and requirements are unusually complex or extreme, all styles of API and front end work well enough. Any example would have to be lengthy, to provide context for the advantages of "true" ReST architecture, and contrived.

thom4• 1 year ago

I struggle to believe that any API in history has been improved by the developer more faithfully following REST’s strictures. The closest we’ve come to actually decoupled, self describing APIs is MCP, and that required inventing actual AIs to understand them.

JimDabell5• 1 year ago

The most successful API in history – the World-Wide Web – uses REST principles. That’s where REST came from. It was somebody who was involved in the creation of the early web who looked at it and wrote down a description of what properties of the web made it so successful.

jdlshore• 1 year ago

REST on the WWW only works because humans read and interpret the results. Arguably, that’s not an API (Application Programming Interface) but a UI (User Interface).

I have yet to see an API that was improved by following strict REST principles. If REST describes the web (a UI, not an API), and it’s the only useful example of REST, is REST really meaningful?

thom4• 1 year ago

This is, almost canonically, the subject of Joel Spolsky's architecture astronauts essay.

sublinear6• 1 year ago

By using HATEOAS and referencing schema definitions (such as XSD or JSON Schema) from within your resource representations, you can enable clients to understand the structure of the data and navigate the API dynamically.

I actually think this is where the problem lies in the real world. One of the most useful features of a JSON schema is the "additionalProperties" keyword. If applied to the "_links" subschema we're back to the original problem of "out of band" information defining the API.

I just don't see what the big deal is if we have more robust ways of serving the docs somewhere else outside of the JSON response. Would it be equivalent if the only URL in "_links" that I ever populate is a link to the JSONified Swagger docs for the "self" path for the client to consume? What's the point in even having "_links" then? How insanely bloated would that client have to be to consume something that complicated? The templates in Swagger are way more information dense and dynamic than just telling you what path and method to use. There's often a lot more for the client to handle than just CRUD links and there exists no JSON schema that could be consistent across all parts of the API.

karel-3d• 1 year ago

Nooooo not this discourse again.

bravesoul22• 1 year ago

Drake meme for me:

REST = Hell No

GQL = Hell No.

RPC with status codes = Grin and point.

I like to get stuff done.

Imagine you are forced to organize your code filed like REST. Folder is a noun. Functions are verbs. One per folder. Etc. Would drive you nuts.

Why do this for API unless the API really really fits that style (rare).

GQL is expensive to parse and hides information from proxies (200 for everything)

JimDabell5• 1 year ago

Imagine you are forced to organize your code filed like REST. Folder is a noun. Functions are verbs. One per folder. Etc. Would drive you nuts.

That’s got nothing to do with REST. You don’t have to do that at all with a REST API. Your URLs can be completely arbitrary.

bravesoul22• 1 year ago

Ok I may have been wrong. I checked the thesis and couldn't see this aspect mentioned. Most of the thesis seems like stuff I agree with. Damn. I'm fighting an impression of REST I had.

porridgeraisin2• 1 year ago

RPC with status codes

Yes. All endpoints POST, JSON in, JSON out (or whatever) and meaningful HTTP status codes. It's a great sweet spot.

Of course, this works only for apps that fetch() and createElement() the UI. But that's a lot of apps.

If I don't want to use an RPC framework or whatever I just do:

  {
    method: "makeBooking",
    argument: {
      one: 1,
      two: "too",
    },
     ...
  }

And have a dictionary in my server mapping method names to the actual functions.

All functions take one param (a dictionary with the data), validate it, use it and return another single dictionary along with appropriate status code.

You can add versions and such but at that point you just use JSON-RPC.

This kind of setup can be much better than REST APIs for certain usecases

ohdeargodno3• 1 year ago

All endpoints POST

This makes automating things like retrying network calls hell. You can safely assume a GET will be idempotent, and safely retry on failure with delay. A POST might, or might not also empty your bank account.

HTTP verbs are not just for decoration.

salmonellaeater• 1 year ago

Where this kind of API design is useful is when there is a user with an agent (e.g. a browser or similar) who can navigate the API and interact with the different responses based on their media types and what the links are called.

Most web APIs are not designed with this use-case in mind. They're designed to facilitate web apps that are much more specific in what they're trying to present to the user. This is both deliberate and valuable; app creators need to be able to control the presentation to achieve their apps' goals.

REST API design is for use-cases where the users should have control over how they interact with the resources provided by the API. Some examples that should be using REST API design:

  - Government portals for publicly accessible information, like legal codes, weather reports, or property records

  - Government portals for filing forms and other interactions

  - Open data initiatives like Wikipedia and OpenStreetmap

Considering these examples, it makes sense that policing of what "REST" means comes from the more academically-minded, while the detractors of the definition are typically app developers trying to create a very specific user experience. The solution is easy: just don't call it REST unless it actually is.

sublinear6• 1 year ago

Government portals for publicly accessible information, like legal codes, weather reports, or property records

Yes, and it's so nice when done well.

https://www.weather.gov/documentation/services-web-api

wvh• 1 year ago

You're right, pure REST is very academic. I've worked with open/big data, and there's always a struggle to get realistic performance and app architecture design; for anything non-obvious, I'd say there are shades of REST rather than a simple boolean yes/no. Even academics have to produce a working solution or "application", i.e. that which can be actually applied, at some point.

thyristan2• 1 year ago

When there is lots of data and performance is important, HTTP is the wrong protocol. JSON/XML/HTML is the wrong data format.

ninkendo• 1 year ago

Where this kind of API design is useful is when there is a user with an agent (e.g. a browser or similar) who can navigate the API and interact with the different responses based on their media types and what the links are called.

The funny thing is, that perfectly describes HTML. Here’s a document with links to other documents, which the user can navigate based on what the links are called. Because if it’s designed for users, it’s called a User Interface. If it’s designed for application programming, it’s called an Application Programming Interface. This is why HATEOAS is kinda silly to me. It pretends APIs should be used by Users directly. But we already have that, it’s called a UI.

thyristan2• 1 year ago

The point is that your Web UI can easily be made to be a REST HATEOAS conforming API at the same time. No separate codepaths, no duplicate efforts, just maybe some JSON templates in addition to HTML templates.

jonfw• 1 year ago

Where this kind of API design is useful is when there is a user with an agent (e.g. a browser or similar) who can navigate the API and interact with the different responses based on their media types and what the links are called.
Most web APIs are not designed with this use-case in mind.

I wonder if this will change as APIs might support AI consumption?

Discoverability is very important to an AI, much more so than to a web app developer.

MCP shows us how powerful tool discoverability can be. HATEOS could bring similar benefits to bare API consumption.

cryptonector5• 1 year ago

Where this kind of API design is useful is when there is a user with an agent (e.g. a browser or similar) who can navigate the API and interact with the different responses based on their media types and what the links are called.

It's also useful when you're programming a client that is not a web page!

You GET a thing, you dereference fields/paths in the returned representation, you construct a new URI, you perform an operation on it, and so on.

Consider a directory / database application. You can define a RESTful, HATEOAS API for it, write a single-page web application for it -or a non-SPA if you prefer-, and also write libraries and command-line interfaces to the same thing, all using roughly similar code that does what I described above. That's pretty neat. In the case of a non-SPA you can use pure HTML and not think that you're "dereferencing fields of the returned representation", but the user and the user-agent are still doing just that.

harshitaneja• 1 year ago

I spent years fussing about getting all of my APIs to fit the definition of REST and to do HATEAOS properly. I spent way too much time trying to conform everything as an action on a resource. Now, don't get me wrong. It is quite helpful to try to model things at stateless resources with a limited set of actions on them and to think about idempotency for specific actions in ways I don't think we did it properly in the SOAP days(at least I didn't). And in many cases it led to less brittle interfaces which were easier to reason about.

I still like REST and try to use it as much as I can when developing interfaces but I am not beholden to it. There are many cases which are not resources or are not stateless and sure you can find some obtuse way to make them be resources but that at times either leads to bad abstractions that don't convey the vocabulary of the underlying system and thus over time creates this rift in context between the interface and the underlying logic or we expose underlying implementation details as they could be easier to model as resources.

imtringued2• 1 year ago

I find it pretty shocking that this was written in 2025 without a mention of the fact that the only clients that are evolvable enough to interface with a REST API can be categorized to these three types:

1. Browsers and "API Browsers" (think something like Swagger)

2. Human and Artificial Intelligence (basically LLMs)

3. Clients downloaded from the server

You'd think that they'd point out these massive caveats. After all, the evolvable client that can handle any API, which is the thing that Roy Fielding has been dreaming about, has finally been invented.

REST and HATEOAS were intentionally developed to against the common use case of a static non-evolving client such as an android app that isn't a browser.

Instead you get this snarky blog post telling people that they are doing REST wrong, rather than pointing out that REST is something almost nobody needs (self discoverable APIs intended for evolvable clients).

If you wanted to build e.g. the matrix chat protocol on top of REST, then Roy Fielding would tell you to get lost.

If what I'm saying doesn't make sense to you, then your understanding of REST is insufficient, but let me tell you that understanding REST is a meaningless endeavor, because all you'll gain from that understanding is that you don't need it.

In REST clients are not allowed to have any out of band information about the structure or schema of the API.

You are not allowed to send GET, POST, PUT, DELETE requests to client constructed URLs.

Now that might sound reasonable. After all HATEOAS gives you all the URLs so you don't need to construct them.

Except here is the kicker. This isn't some URL specific thing. It also applies to the attributes and links in the response. You're not allowed to assume that the name "John Doe" is stored under the attribute "name" or that the activate link is stored in "activate". Your client needs to handle any theoretical API that could come from the server. "name" could be "fullName" or "firstNameAndLastName" or "firstAndLastName" or "displayName".

Now you might argue, hey but I'm allowed to parse JSON into a hierarchical object layout [0] and JPEGs into a two dimensional pixel array to be displayed onto a screen, surely it's just a matter of setting a content type or media type? Then I'll be allowed to write code specific to my resource! Except, REST doesn't define or propose any mechanism for application specific media types. You must register your media type globally for all humanity at IANA or go bust.

This might come across as a rant, but it is meant to be informative so I'll tell you what REST and HATEOAS are good for: Building micro browsers relying on human intelligence to act as the magical evolvable client. The way you're supposed to use REST and HATEOAS is by using e.g. the HAL-FORMS media type to give a logical representation of your form. Your evolvable client then translates the HAL-FORM into a html form or an android form or a form inside your MMO which happens to have a registration form built into the game itself, rather than say the launcher.

Needless to say, this is completely useless for machine to machine communication, which is where the phrase "REST API" is most commonly (ab)used.

Now for one final comment on this article in particular:

Why aren’t most APIs truly RESTful?
The widespread adoption of a simpler, RPC-like style over HTTP can probably attributed to practical trade-offs in tooling and developer experience: The ecosystem around specifications like OpenAPI grew rapidly, offering immediate, benefits that proved irresistible to development teams.

This is actually completely irrelevant and ignores the fact that REST as designed was never meant to be used in the vast situations where RPC over HTTP is used. The use cases for "RPC over HTTP" and REST have incredibly low overlap.

These tools provided powerful features like automatic client/server code generation, interactive documentation, and request validation out-of-the-box. For a team under pressure to deliver, the clear, static contract provided by an OpenAPI definition was and still is probably often seen as “good enough,”

This feels like a complete reversal and shows that the author of this blog post himself doesn't understand the practical implications of his own blog post. The entire point of HATEOAS is that you cannot have automatic client code generation unless it happens during the runtime of the application. It's literally not allowed to generate code in REST, because it prevents your client from evolving at runtime.

making the long-term architectural benefits of HATEOAS, like evolvability, seem abstract and less urgent.

Except as I said, unless you have a requirement to have something like a mini browser embedded in a smartphone app, desktop application or video game, what's the point of that evolvability?

Furthermore, the initial cognitive overhead of building a truly hypermedia-driven client was perceived as a significant barrier.

Significant barrier is probably the understatement of the century. Building the "truly hypermedia-driven client" is equivalent to solving AGI in the machine to machine communication use case. The browser use-case only works because humans already possess general intelligence.

It felt easier for a developer to read documentation and hardcode a URI template like /users/{id}/orders than to write a client that could dynamically parse a _links section and discover the “orders” URI at runtime.

Now the author is using snark to appeal to emotions by equivocating the simplest and most irrelevant problem with the hardest problem in a hand waving manner. "Those silly code monkeys, how dare they not build AGI! It's as simple as parsing _links and discover the "orders" URI at runtime". Except as I said, you're not allowed to assume that there is an "orders" link since that is out of band information. Your client must be intelligent enough to not only handle a API where the "/user/{id}/orders" link is stored under _links. The server is allowed give the link of "/user/{id}/orders" a randomly generated name that is changing with every request. It's also allowed to change the url path to any randomly generated structure, as long as the server is able to keep track of it. The HATEOAS server is allowed to return a human language description of each field and link, but the client is not allowed to assume that the orders are stored under any specific attribute. Hence you'd need an LLM to know which field is the "orders" field.

In many common scenarios, such as a front-end single-page application being developed by the same team as the back-end, the client and server are already tightly coupled. In this context, the primary problem that HATEOAS solves—decoupling the client from the server’s URI structure—doesn’t present as an immediate pain point, making the simpler, documentation-driven approach the path of least resistance.

Bangs head at desk over and over and over. A webapp that is using HTML and JS downloaded from the server is following the spirit of HATEOAS. The client evolves with the server. That's the entire point of REST and HATEOAS.

[0] Whose contents may only be processed in a structure oblivious way

thaumasiotes5• 1 year ago

rather than pointing out that REST is something almost nobody needs (self discoverable APIs intended for evolvable clients).

Well, besides that, I don't see how REST solves the problem it says it addresses. So your user object includes an activate field that describes the URI you hit to activate the user. When that URI changes, the client doesn't even notice, because it queries for a user and then visits whatever it finds in the activate field.

Then you change the term from "activate" to "unslumber". How does the client figure that out? How is this a different problem from changing the user activation URI?

nchmy8• 1 year ago

Instead you get this snarky blog post telling people that they are doing REST wrong, rather than pointing out that REST is something almost nobody needs (self discoverable APIs intended for evolvable clients).

Were using actual REST right now. That's what SSR html uses.

The rest of your (vastly snarkier) diatribe can be ignored.

And, yet, you then said the following, which seems to contradict the rest of what you said before it...

Bangs head at desk over and over and over. A webapp that is using HTML and JS downloaded from the server is following the spirit of HATEOAS. The client evolves with the server. That's the entire point of REST and HATEOAS.

cryptonector5• 1 year ago

the only clients that are evolvable enough to interface with a REST API can be categorized to these three types

You mention swagger. Swagger is an anti-REST tech. Defining a media type is the REST equivalent of writing a swagger API description.

If you can define an API in swagger, you can define one via a media type. It's just that the latter is generally not done because to do it requires a JSON schema (or similar) and people mostly don't use that or think of that as how one defines an API.

Boss: we need an API for XYZ

Employee: sure thing boss, I'll write it in swagger and implement by Friday!

cjpearson2• 1 year ago

I sympathize with the pedantry here and found Fielding's paper to be interesting, but this is a lost battle. When I see "REST API" I can safely assume the following:

- The API returns JSON

- CRUD actions are mapped to POST/GET/PUT/DELETE

- The team constantly bikesheds over correct status codes and at least a few are used contrary to the HTTP spec

- There's a decent chance listing endpoints were changed to POST to support complex filters

Like Agile, CI or DevOps you can insist on the original definition or submit to the semantic diffusion and use the terms as they are commonly understood.

delusional• 1 year ago

Importantly for the discussion, this also doesn't mean the push for REST api's was a failure. Sure, we didn't end up with what was precisely envisioned from that paper, but we still got a whole lot better than CORBA and SOAP.

The lowest common denominator in the REST world is a lot better than the lowest common denominator in SOAP world, but you have to convince the technically literate and ideological bunch first.

hnfong• 1 year ago

We still have gRPC though...

pantulis• 1 year ago

The team constantly bikesheds over correct status codes and at least a few are used contrary to the HTTP spec

I had to chuckle here. So true!

skrebbel• 1 year ago

Hell yeah. IMO we should collectively get over ourselves and just agree that what you describe is the true, proper, present-day meaning of "REST API".

OJFord3• 1 year ago

I can safely assume [...] CRUD actions are mapped to POST/GET/PUT/DELETE

Not totally sure about that - I think you need to check what they decided about PUT vs PATCH.

Xenoamorphous2• 1 year ago

Isn't that fairly straightforward? PUT for full updates and PATCH for partial ones. Does anybody do anything different?

Supermancho• 1 year ago

It's always better to use GET/POST exclusively. The verb mapping was theoretical from someone who didn't have to implement. I've long ago caved to the reality of the web's limited support for most of the other verbs.

raverbashing• 1 year ago

Yeah

I can assure you very few people care

And why would they? They're getting value out of this and it fits their head and model view

Sweating over this takes you nowhere

ohdeargodno3• 1 year ago

- There's a decent chance listing endpoints were changed to POST to support complex filters

Please. Everyone knows they tried to make the complex filter work as a GET, then realized the filtering query is so long that it breaks whatever WAF or framework is being used because they block queries longer than 4k chars.

the__alchemist• 1 year ago

I use the term "HTTP API"; more general. Context, in light of your definition: In many cases labeled "REST", there will only be POST, or POST and GET, and HTTP 200 status with an error in JSON is used instead of HTTP status codes. Your definition makes sense as a weaker form of the original, but it it still too strict compared to how the term is used. "REST" = "HTTP with JSON bodies" is the most practical definition I have.

Gormo2• 1 year ago

HTTP 200 status with an error in JSON is used instead of HTTP status codes

I've seen some APIs that not only always return a 200 code, but will include a response in the JSON that itself indicates whether the HTTP request was successfully received, not whether the operation was successfully completed.

Building usable error handling with that kind of response is a real pain: there's no single identifier that indicates success/failure status, so we had to build our own lookup table of granular responses specific to each operation.

VladVladikoff2• 1 year ago

HTTP 200 status with an error in JSON is used instead of HTTP status codes

This is a bad approach. It prevents your frontend proxies from handling certain errors better. Such as: caching, rate limiting, or throttling abuse.

k2xl• 1 year ago

This is very true. Over my 15 years of engineering, I have never suffered_that_ much with integrating with an api (assuming it exists). So the lack of "HATEOaS" hasn't even been noticable for me. As long as they get most of the 400 status codes right (specifically 200, 401, 403, 429) I usually have no issuss integrating and don't even notice that they don't have some "discoverable api". As long as I can get the data I need or can make the update I need I am fine.

I think good rest api design is more a service for the engineer than the client.

mrweasel• 1 year ago

As long as they get most of the 400 status codes right (specifically 200, 401, 403, 429)

A client had build an API that would return 200 on broken requests. We pointed it out and asked if maybe it could return 500, to make monitoring easier. Sure thing, next version "Http 200 - 500", they just wrote 500 in the message body, return remained 200.

Some developers just do not understand http.

osigurdson8• 1 year ago

It isn't clear that HATEOS would be better. For instance:

>Clients shouldn’t assume or hardcode paths like /users/123/posts

Is it really net better to return something like the following just so you can change the url structure.

"_links": { "posts": { "href": "/users/123/posts" }, }

I mean, so what? We've create some indirection so that the url can change (e.g. "/u/123/posts").

motorest21• 1 year ago

So the lack of "HATEOaS" hasn't even been noticable for me.

I think HATEOAS tackles problems such as API versioning, service discovery, and state management in thin clients. API versioning is trivial to manage with sound API Management policies, and the remaining problems aren't really experienced by anyone. So you end up having to go way out of your way to benefit from HATEOAS, and you require more complexity both on clients and services.

In the end it's a solution searching for problems, and no one has those problems.

eska• 1 year ago

While I ask people whether they actually mean REST according to the paper or not, I am one of the people who refuse to just move on. The reason being that the mainstream use of the term doesn’t actually mean anything, it is not useful, and therefore not pragmatic at all. I basically say “so you actually just mean some web API, ok” and move on with that. The important difference being that I need to figure out the peculiarities of each such web API.

osigurdson8• 1 year ago

> The important difference being that I need to figure out the peculiarities of each such web API

So if they say it is Roy Fielding certified, you would not have to figure out any "peculiarities"? I'd argue that creating a typical OpenAPI style spec which sticks to standard conventions is more professional than creating a pedantically HATEOAS API. Users of your API will be confused and confusion leads to bugs.

infecto2• 1 year ago

So you enjoy being pedantic for the sake of being pedantic? I see no useful benefit either from a professional or social setting to act like this.

I don’t find this method of discovery very productive and often regardless of meeting some standard in the API the real peculiarities are in the logic of the endpoints and not the surface.

calvinmorrison• 1 year ago

REST means, generally, HTTP requests with json as a result.

andoando3• 1 year ago

REST is pretty much impossible to adhere to for any sufficiently complex API and we should just toss it in the garbage

lazyasciiart• 1 year ago

Haha, our API still returns XML. At least, most of the endpoints do. Not the ones written by that guy who thinks predictability in an API is lower priority than modern code, those ones return JSON.

anonymars• 1 year ago

I present to you this monstrosity: https://stackoverflow.com/q/39110233

Presumably they had an existing API, and then REST became all the rage, so they remapped the endpoints and simply converted the XML to JSON. What do you do with the <tag>value</tag> construct? Map it to the name `$`!

Congratulations, we're REST now, the world is a better place for it. Off to the pub to celebrate, gents. Ugh.

I think people tend to forget these things are tools, not shackles

impostervt• 1 year ago

As long as it's not SOAP, it's great.

VladVladikoff2• 1 year ago

If I never have to use SOAP again in my life, I will die a happy man.

lucideer2• 1 year ago

- CRUD actions are mapped to POST/GET/PUT/DELETE

Agree on your other three but I've seen far too many "REST APIs" with update, delete & even sometimes read operations behind a POST. "SOAP-style REST" I like to call it.

tgv3• 1 year ago

Do you care? From my point of view, post, put, delete, update, and patch all do the same. I would argue that if there is a difference, making the distinction in the url instead of the request method makes it easier to search code and log. And what's the correct verb anyway?

So that's an argument that there may be too many request methods, but you could also argue there aren't enough. But then standardization becomes an absolute mess.

So I say: GET or POST.

oneeyedpigeon• 1 year ago

even sometimes read operations behind a POST

Even worse than that, when an API like the Pinboard API (v1) uses GET for write operations!

LinXitoW2• 1 year ago

I actually had to change an API recently TO this. The request payload was getting too big, so we needed to send it via POST as a body.

Cthulhu_• 1 year ago

HTTP/JSON API works too, but you can assume it's what they mean by REST.

It makes me wish we stuck with XML based stuff, it had proper standards, strictly enforced by libraries that get confused by things not following the standards. HTTP/JSON APIs are often hand-made and hand-read, NIH syndrone running rampant because it's perceived to be so simple and straightforward. To the point of "we don't need a spec, you can just see the response yourself, right?". At least that was the state ~2012, nowadays they use an OpenAPI spec but it's often incomplete, regardless of whether it's handmade (in which case people don't know everything they have to fill in) or generated (in which case the generators will often have limitations and MAYBE support for some custom comments that can fill in the gaps).

Zambyte• 1 year ago

Assuming the / was meant to describe it as both an HTTP API and a JSON API (rather than HTTP API / JSON API) it should be JSON/HTTP, as it is JSON over HTTP, like TCP/IP or GNU/Linux :)

ivan_gammel14• 1 year ago

This. Or maybe we should call it "Rest API" in lowercase, meaning not the state transfer, but the state of mind, where developer reached satisfaction with API design and is no longer bothered with hypermedia controls, schemas etc.

motorest21• 1 year ago

HTTP/JSON API works too, but you can assume it's what they mean by REST.

This is the kind of slippery slope where pedantic nitpickers thrive. The start to complain that if you accept any media type other than JSON then it's not "REST-adjacent" anymore because JSON is in the name and some bloke wrote down somewhere that JSON was a trait of this architectural style.

In this sense, the term "RESTful" is useful to shut down these pedantic nitpickers. It's "REST-adjacent" still, but the right answer to nitpicking is "who cares".

marcosdumay7• 1 year ago

it had proper standards

Lol. Have you read them?

SOAP in particular can really not be described as "proper".

It had the advantage that the API docs were always generated, and thus correct, but the most common thing is for one software stack not being able to use a service built with another stack.

harha_• 1 year ago

I recall having to maintain an integration to some obscure SOAP API that ate and spit out XML with strict schemas and while I can't remember much about it, I think the integration broke quite easily if the other end changed their API somehow.

enobrev• 1 year ago

Sounds about right. I've been calling this REST-ish for years and generally everyone I say that to gets what I mean without much (any) explanation.

motorest21• 1 year ago

I sympathize with the pedantry here and found Fielding's paper to be interesting, but this is a lost battle.

Why do people feel compelled to even consider it to be a battle?

As I see it, the REST concept is useful, but the HATEOAS detail ends up having no practical value and creates more problems than the ones it solves. This is in line with the Richardson maturity model[1], where the apex of REST includes all the HATEOAS bells and whistles.

Should REST without HATEOAS classify as REST? Why not? I mean, what is the strong argument to differentiate an architectural style that meets all but one requirement? And is there a point to this nitpicking if HATEOAS is practically irrelevant and the bulk of RESTful APIs do not implement it? What's the value in this nitpicking? Is there any value to cite thesis as if they where Monty Python skits?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richardson_Maturity_Model

naasking10• 1 year ago

HATEOAS adds lots of practical value if you care about discoverability and longevity.

ivan_gammel14• 1 year ago

the HATEOAS detail ends up having no practical value and creates more problems than the ones it solves.

Many server-rendered websites support REST by design: a web page with links and forms is the state transferred to client. Even in SPAs, HATEOAS APIs are great for shifting business logic and security to server, where it belongs. I have built plenty of them, it does require certain mindset, but it does make many things easier. What problems are you talking about?

commandlinefan2• 1 year ago

We should probably stop calling the thing that we call REST, REST and be done with it - it's only tangentially related to what Fielding tried to define.

cle• 1 year ago

For me the battle is with people who want to waste time bikeshedding over the definition of "REST" and whether the APIs are "RESTful", with no practical advantages, and then having to steer the conversation--and their motivation--towards more useful things without alienating them. It's tiresome.

troupo12• 1 year ago

but the HATEOAS detail ends up having no practical value and creates more problems than the ones it solves.

Only because we never had the tools and resources that, say, GraphQL has.

And now everyone keeps re-inventing half of HTTP anyway. See this diagram https://raw.githubusercontent.com/for-GET/http-decision-diag... (docs https://github.com/for-GET/http-decision-diagram/tree/master...) and this: https://github.com/for-GET/know-your-http-well

cryptonector5• 1 year ago

Defining media types seems right to me, but what ends up happening is that you use swagger instead to define APIs and out the window goes HATEOAS, and part of the reason for this is just that defining media types is not something people do (though they should).

Basically: define a schema for your JSON, use an obvious CRUD mapping to HTTP verbs for all actions, use URI local-parts embedded in the JSON, use standard HTTP status codes, and embed more error detail in the JSON.

reactordev• 1 year ago

I’m with you. HATEOAS is great when you have two independent (or more) enterprise teams with PMs fighting for budget.

When it’s just yours and your two pizza team, contract-first-design is totally fine. Just make sure you can version your endpoints or feature-flag new API’s so it doesn’t break your older clients.

rafark• 1 year ago

Why do people feel compelled to even consider it to be a battle?

Because words have specific meanings. There’s a specific expectation when using them. It’s like if someone said “I can’t install this app on my iPhone” but then they have an android phone. They are similar in that they’re both smartphones and overall behave and look similar, but they’re still different.

If you are told an api is restful there’s an expectation of how it will behave.

drewcoo2• 1 year ago

Why do people feel compelled to even consider it to be a battle?

Because September isn't just for users.

masklinn4• 1 year ago

Should REST without HATEOAS classify as REST? Why not?

Because what got backnamed HATEOAS is the very core of what Fielding called REST: https://roy.gbiv.com/untangled/2008/rest-apis-must-be-hypert...

Everything else is window dressing.

fud101• 1 year ago

I sympathize with the pedantry here and found Fielding's paper to be interesting, but this is a lost battle.

True. Losing hacking/hacker was sad but I can live with it - crypto becoming associated with scam coins instead of cryptography makes me want to fight.

meehai• 1 year ago

the last point got me.

How can you idiomatically do a read only request with complex filters? For me both PUT and POST are "writable" operations, while "GET" are assumed to be read only. However, if you need to encode the state of the UI (filters or whatnot), it's preferred to use JSON rather than query params (which have length limitations).

So ... how does one do it?

shagie• 1 year ago

POST the filter, get a response back with the query to follow up with for the individual resources.

    POST /complex
    
    value1=something
    value2=else

which then responds with

    201 Created
    Location https://example.com/complex/53301a34-92d3-447d-ac98-964e9a8b3989

And then you can make GET request calls against that resource.

It adds in some data expiration problems to be solved, but its reasonably RESTful.

sahruum9• 1 year ago

There was a proposal[1] a while back to define a new SEARCH verb that was basically just a GET with a body for this exact purpose.

[1] https://www.ietf.org/archive/id/draft-ietf-httpbis-safe-meth...

ivan_gammel14• 1 year ago

If you really want this idiomatically correct, put the data in JSON or other suitable format, zip it and encode in Base64 to pass via GET as a single parameter. To hit the browser limits you will need so big query that you may hit UX constraints earlier in many cases (2048 bytes is 50+ UUIDs or 100+ polygon points etc).

Pros: the search query is a link that can be shared, the result can be cached. Cons: harder to debug, may not work in some cases due to URI length limits.

kevindamm• 1 year ago

One uses POST and recognizes that REST doesn't have to be so prescriptive.

The part of REST to focus on here is that the response from earlier well-formed requests will include all the forms (and possibly scripts) that allow for the client to make additional well-formed requests. If the complex filters are able to be made with a resource representation or from the root index, regardless of HTTP methods used, I think it should still count as REST (granted, HATEOAS is only part of REST but I think it should be a deciding part here).

When you factor in the effects of caching by intermediate proxy servers, you may find yourself adapting any search-like method to POST regardless, or at least GET with params, but you don't always want to, or can't, put the entire formdata in params.

Plus, with the vagaries of CSRF protections, per-user rate-limiting and access restrictions, etc.,, your GET is likely to turn into a POST for anything non-trivial. I wouldn't advise trying for pure REST-ful on the merits of its purity.

cjpearson2• 1 year ago

Soon, hopefully, QUERY will save us all. In the meantime, simply using POST is fine.

I've also seen solutions where you POST the filter config, then reference the returned filter ID in the GET request, but that often seems like overkill even if it adds some benefits.

rswail5• 1 year ago

HTML FORMs are limited to www-form-encoded or multipart. The length or the queries on a GET with a FORM is limited by intermediaries that shouldn't be limiting it. But that's reality.

Do a POST of a query document/media type that returns a "Location" that contains the query resource that the server created as well as the data (or some of it) with appropriate link elements to drive the client to receive the remainder of the query.

In this case, the POST is "writing" a query resource to the server and the server is dealing with that query resource and returning the resulting information.

9rx• 1 year ago

"Filters" suggests that you are trying to query. So, QUERY, perhaps? https://httpwg.org/http-extensions/draft-ietf-httpbis-safe-m...

Or stop worrying and just use POST. The computer isn't going to care.

nico• 1 year ago

Like Agile, CI or DevOps you can insist on the original definition or submit to the semantic diffusion and use the terms as they are commonly understood

This is an insightful observation. It happens with pretty much everything

As it has been happening recently with the term vibecoding. It started with some definition, and now it’s morphed into more or less just meaning ai-assisted coding. Some people don’t like it[1]

1: https://simonwillison.net/2025/Mar/19/vibe-coding/

marcosdumay7• 1 year ago

I really hate my conclusions here, but from a limited freedom point of view, if all of that is going to happen...

The team constantly bikesheds over correct status codes and at least a few are used contrary to the HTTP spec

So we should better start with a standard scaffolding for the replies so we can encode the errors and forget about status codes. So the only thing generating an error status is unhandled exception mapped to 500. That's the one design that survives people disagreeing.

There's a decent chance listing endpoints were changed to POST to support complex filters

So we'd better just standardize that lists support both GET and POST from the beginning. While you are there, also accept queries on both the url and body parameters.

bokchoi• 1 year ago

The world would be lovely if we could have standard error, listing responses, and a common query syntax.

I haven't done REST apis in a while, but I came across this recently for standardizing the error response: https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc9457.html

cratermoon• 1 year ago

The team constantly bikesheds over correct status codes and at least a few are used contrary to the HTTP spec

I've done this enough times that now I don't really bother engaging. I don't believe anyone gets it 100% correct ever. As long as there is nothing egregiously incorrect, I'll accept whatever.

bunderbunder3• 1 year ago

I also view it as inevitable.

I can count on one hand the number of times I've worked on a service that can accurately be modeled as just representational state transfer. The rest have at least some features that are inherently, inescapably some form of remote procedure call. Which the original REST model eschews.

This creates a lot of impedance mismatch, because the HTTP protocol's semantics just weren't designed to model that kind of thing. So yeah, it is hard to figure out how to shoehorn that into POST/GET/PUT/DELETE and HTTP status codes. And folks who say it's easy tend to get there by hyper-focusing on that one time they were lucky enough to be working on a project where it wasn't so hard, and dismissing as rare exceptions the 80% of cases where it did turn out to be a difficult quagmire that forced a bunch of unsatisfying compromises.

Alternatively you can pick a protocol that explicitly supports RPC. But that's not necessarily any better because all the well-known options with good language support are over-engineered monstrosities like GRPC, SOAP, and (shudder) CORBA. It might reduce your domain modeling headaches, but at the cost of increased engineering and operations hassle. I really can't blame anyone for deciding that an ad-hoc, ill-specified, janky application of not-actually-REST is the more pragmatic option. Because, frankly, it probably is.

SoftTalker3• 1 year ago

xml-rpc (before it transmogrified into SOAP) was pretty simple and flexible. Still exists, and there is a JSON variant now too. It's effectively what a lot of web APIs are: a way to invoke a method or function remotely.

PaulHoule8• 1 year ago

Fielding won the war precisely because he was intellectually incoherent and mostly wrong. It's the "worse is better" of the 21st century.

RPC systems were notoriously unergonomic and at best marginally successful. See Sun RPC, RMI, DCOM, CORBA, XML-RPC, SOAP, Protocol Buffers, etc.

People say it is not RPC but all the time we write some function in Javascript like

   const getItem = async (itemId) => { ... }

which does a

   GET /item/{item_id}

and on the backend we have a function that looks like

   Item getItem(String itemId) { ... }

with some annotation that explains how to map the URL to an item call. So it is RPC, but instead of a highly complex system that is intellectually coherent but awkward and makes developers puke, we have a system that's more manual than it could be but has a lot of slack and leaves developers feeling like they're in control. 80% of what's wrong with it is that people won't just use ISO 8601 dates.

majkinetor• 1 year ago

Amen. Particularly ISO8601.

singpolyma3• 1 year ago

I mean, HTTP is an RPC protocol. It has methods and arguments and return types.

What I object to about eg xml-rpc is that it layers a second RPC protocol over HTTP so now I have two of them...

bborud7• 1 year ago

What RPC mechanisms, in your opinion, are the most ergonomic and why?

(I have been offering REST’ish and gRPC in software I write for many years now. With the REST’ish api generated from the gRPC APIs. I’m leaning towards dropping REST and only offering gRPC. Mostly because the generated clients are so ugly)

mardifoufs2• 1 year ago

I'm not super familiar with SOAP and CORBA, but how is SOAP any more coherent than a "RESTful" API? It's basically just a bag of messages. I guess it involves a schema, but that's not more coherent imo, since you just end up with specifics for every endpoint anyways.

CORBA is less "incoherent", but I'm not sure that's actually helpful, since it's still a huge mess. You can most likely become a lot more proficient with RESTful APIs and be more productive with them, much faster than you could with CORBA. Even if CORBA is extremely well specified, and "RESTful" is based more on vibes than anything specific.

Though to be clear I'm talking about the current definition of REST APIs, not the original, which I think wasn't super useful.

necovek2• 1 year ago

I remember getting my hands on a CORBA specification back as a wide-eyed teen thinking there is this magical world of programming purity somewhere: all 1200 pages of it, IIRC (not sure what version).

And then you don't really need most of it, and one thing you need is so utterly complicated, that it is stupid (no RoI) to even bother being compliant.

And truly, less is more.

agumonkey8• 1 year ago

When I realized that I was calling openapi-generator to create client side call stubs on non-small service oriented project, I started missing J2EE EJB. And it takes a lot to miss EJB.

I'd like to ask seasoned devs and engineers here. Is it the normal industry-wide blind spot where people still crave for and are happy creating 12 different description of the same things across remote, client, unit tests, e2e tests, orm, api schemas, all the while feeling much more productive than <insert monolith here> ?

masklinn4• 1 year ago

Fielding won the war

It’s a bit odd to say fielding “won the war” when for years he had a blog pointing out all the APIs doing RPC over HTTP and calling it REST.

He formalised a concept and gave it a snappy name, and then the concept got left behind and the name stolen away from the purpose he created it for.

If that’s what you call victory, I guess Marx can rest easy.

yieldcrv• 1 year ago

100% agreed, “language evolves”

This article also tries to make the distinction of not focusing on the verbs themselves. That the RESTful dissertation doesn’t focus on them.

The other side of this is that the IETF RESTful proposals from 1999 that talk about the protocol for implementation are just incomplete. The obscure verbs have no consensus on their implementation and libraries across platforms may do PUT, PATCH, DELETE incompatibly. This is enough reason to just stick with GET and POST and not try to be a strict REST adherents since you’ll hit a wall.

necovek2• 1 year ago

To me, the most important nuance really is that just like "hypermedia links" (encoded as different link types, either with Link HTTP header or within the returned results) are "generic" (think that "activate" link), so is REST as done today: if you messed up and the proper action should not be "activate" but "enable", you are in no better position than having to change from /api/v1/account/ID/activate to /api/v2/account/ID/enable.

You still have to "hard code" somewhere what action anything needs to do over an API (and there is more missing metadata, like icons, translations for action description...).

Mostly to say that any thought of this approach being more general is only marginal, and really an illusion!

agumonkey8• 1 year ago

this is most probably a 90% hit

foobarian3• 1 year ago

I've been doing web development for more than a decade and I still can't figure out what REST actually means, it's more of a vibe.

When I think about some of the RESTy things we do like return part of the response as different HTTP codes, they don't really add that much value vs. keeping things on the same layer. So maybe the biggest value add so far is JSON, which thanks to its limited nature prevents complication, and OpenAPI ecosystem which grew kinda organically to provide pretty nice codegen and clients.

More complexity lessons here: look at oneOf support in OpenAPI implementations, and you will find half of them flat out don't have it, and the other half are buggy even in YOTL 2025.

9dev2• 1 year ago

I've been doing web development for more than a decade and I still can't figure out what REST actually means, it's more of a vibe.

While I generally agree that REST isn’t really useful outside of academic thought experiments: I’ve been in this about as long as you are, and it really isn’t hard. Try reading Fieldings paper once; the ideas are sound and easy to understand, it’s just with a different vision of the internet than the one we ended up creating.

turnsout• 1 year ago

  > The team constantly bikesheds over correct status codes and at least a few are used contrary to the HTTP spec

Haha yes! Is it even a dev team if they haven't had an overly heated argument about which 4xx code to return for an error state?

Waterluvian• 1 year ago

I describe mine as a JSON-Based Representational State SOAP API to other internal teams. When their eyes cross I get to work sifting through the contents of their pockets for linting errors and JIRA tickets.

synergy20• 1 year ago

RESTful has gone far beyond the http world. It's the new RPC with JSON payload for whatever. I use it on embedded systems that has no database at all, POST/GET/PUT/DELETE etc are perfectly simple to map into WRITE|READ|Modify|Remove commands. As long as the API is documented, I don't really care about its http origins.

esafak2• 1 year ago

The team constantly bikesheds over correct status codes and at least a few are used contrary to the HTTP spec

401 Unauthorized. When the user is unauthenticated.

403 Forbidden. When the user is unauthorized.

Joker_vD3• 1 year ago

- The team constantly bikesheds over correct status codes and at least a few are used contrary to the HTTP spec

I really wish people just used 200 status code and put encoded errors in the payloads themselves instead of trying to fuse the transport layer's (which HTTP serves as, in this case) concerns with the application's concerns. Seriously, HTTP does not mandate that e.g. "HTTP/1.1 503 Ooops\r\n\r\n" should be stuffed into the TCP's RST packet, or into whatever TLS uses to signal severe errors, for bloody obvious reasons: it doesn't belong there.

Like, when you get a 403/404 error, it's very bloody difficult to tell apart the "the reverse proxy before the server is misconfigured and somebody forgot to expose the endpoint" and "the server executed your request to look up an item perfectly fine: the DB is functional, and the item you asked for is not in there" scenarios. And yeah, of course I could (and should) look at and try to parse the response's body but why? This "let's split off the 'error code' part of the message from the message and stuff it somewhere into the metadata, that'll be fine, those never get messed up or used for anything else, so no chance of confusion" approach just complicates things for everyone for no benefit whatsoever.

TOGoS• 1 year ago

Eh, if you're doing RPC where the whole request/response are already in another layer on top of HTTP, then sure, 200 everything.

But to me, "REST" means "use the HTTP verbs to talk about resources". The whole point is that for resource-oriented APIs, you don't need another layer. In which case serving 404s for things that don't exist, or 409s when you try to put things into a weird state makes perfect sense.

potamic3• 1 year ago

The point of status codes is to have a standard that any client can understand. If you have a load balancer, the load balancer can unhealthy backends based on the status code. Similarly if you have some job scheduler or workflow engine that's calling your API, they can execute an appropriate retry strategy based on the status code. The client in most cases does not care about why something failed, only whether it has failed. Being able to tell apart if the failure was due to reverse proxy or database or whatever is the server's concern and the server can always do that with its own custom error codes.

drewcoo2• 1 year ago

I have seen monstrosities claiming to be rest that use HTTP but actually have a separate set of action verbs, nestled inside of HTTP's.

In a server holding a "deck of cards," there might be a "HTTP GET <blah-de-blah>/shuffle.html" call with the side-effect of performing a server-side randomization operation.

I just made that up because I don't want to impugn anyone. But I've seen API sets full of nonsense just like that.

gherkinnn• 1 year ago

Exactly. What you describe is how I see REST being used today and I wish people accepted the semantic shift and stopped with their well-ackshually. It serves nothing.

pbreit3• 1 year ago

- the inclusion of HATEAOS links which are NEVER used

jillesvangurp• 1 year ago

If you want to produce better APIs, try consuming them. A lot of places have this clean split between backend and frontend teams. They barely talk to each other sometimes. And a pattern I've seen over and over again is that some product manager decides feature X is needed. The backend team goes to work and delivers some API for feature X and then the frontend team has to consume the API. These APIs aren't necessarily very good if the backend people don't understand how the frontend uses them.

The symptom is usually if a seemingly simple API change on the backend leads to a lot of unexpected client side complexity to consume the API. That's because the API change breaks with some frontend expectation/assumption that frontend developers then need to work around. A simple example: including a userId with a response. To a frontend developer, the userId is not useful. They'll need a user name, a profile photo, etc. Now you get into all sorts of possible "why don't you just .." type solutions. I've done them all. They all have issues and it leads to a lot of complexity on either the server or the client.

You can bloat your API and calculate all this server side. Now all your API calls that include a userId gain some extra fields. Which means extra lookups and joins. So they get a bit slower as well. But the frontend can pretend that the server always tells it everything it needs. The other solution is to look things up from the frontend. This adds overhead. But if the frontend is clever about it, a lot of that information is very cachable. And of course graphql emerged to give frontend developers the ability to just ask for what they need from some microservices.

All these approaches have pros and cons. Most of the complexity is about what comes back, not about how it comes back or how it is parsed. But it helps if the backend developers are at least aware of what is needed on the frontend. A good way is to just do some front end development for a while. It will make you a better backend developer. Or do both. And by that I don't mean do javascript everywhere and style yourself as a full stack developer because you whack all nails with the same hammer. I mean doing things properly and experiencing the mismatches and friction for yourself. And then learn to do it properly.

The above example with the userIds is real. I've had to deal with that on multiple projects. And I've tried all of the approaches. My most recent insight here is that user information changes infrequently and should be looked up separately from other information asynchronously and then cached client side. This keeps APIs simple and forces frontend developers to not treat the server as a magical oracle and instead do sane things client side to minimize API calls and deal with application state. Good state management is key. If you don't have that, dealing with stateless network protocols (like REST) is painful. But state has to live somewhere and having it client side makes you less dependent on how the server side state management works. Which means it's easier to fix things when that needs to change.

mixedbit9• 1 year ago

When I was working on my first HTTP-based API 13 years ago, based on many comments about true REST, I decided to first study what REST should really be. I've read Fielding's paper cover to cover, I've read RESTful Web Services Cookbook from O'Reilly and then proceeded to workaround Django idioms to provide REST API. This was a bit cargo cult thinking from my end, I didn't truly understand how REST would benefit my service. I took me several more years and several more HTTP APIs to understand that in the case of these services, there were no benefits.

The vision of API that is self discoverable and that works with a generic client is not practical in most cases. I think that perhaps AWS dashboard with its multitude of services has some generic UI code that allows to handle these services without service-specific logic, but I doubt even that.

Fielding's paper doesn't provide a complete recipe for building self-discoverable APIs. It is an architecture, but the details of how clients should really discover the endpoints and determine what these endpoints are doing is left out of the paper. To make truly discoverable API you need to specify protocol for endpoints discovery, operations descriptions, help messages etc. Then you need clients that understand your specification, so it is not really a generic client. If your service is the only one that implements this client, you made a lot of extra effort to end up with the same solution that not REST services implement - a service provides an API and JS code to work with the API (or a command line client that works with the API), but there is no client code reuse at all.

I also think that good UX is not compatible with REST goals. From a user perspective, app-specific code can provide better UX than generic code that can discover endpoints and provide UI for any app. Of course, UI elements can be standardized and described in some languages (remember XUL?), so UI can adapt to app requirements. But the most flexible way for such standardization is to provide a language like JavaScript that is responsible for building UI.

pradn4• 1 year ago

I think you're right. APIs have a lot of aspects to them, so describing them is hard. API users need to know typical latency bounds, which error codes may be retried, whether an action is atomic or idempotent. HATEOAS gets you none of these things.

So fully implementing a perfect version of REST is usually not necessary for most types of problems users actually encounter.

What REST has given us is an industry-wide lingua franca. At the basic level, it's a basic understanding of how to map nouns/verbs to HTTP verbs and URLs. Users get to use the basic HTTP response codes. There's still a ton of design and subtlety to all this. Do you really get to do things that are technically allowed, but might break at a typical load balancer (returning bodies with certain error codes)? Is your returning 500 retriable in all cases, with what preferred backoff behavior?

ralferoo• 1 year ago

I think this hits the nail on the head. Complaining that the current understanding of REST isn't exactly the same as the original usage is missing the point that now REST gives people a good idea of what to expect and how to use the exposed interface.

It's actually a very analogous complaint to how object-oriented programming isn't how it was supposed to be and that only Smalltalk got it right. People now understand what is meant when people say OOP even if it's not what the creator of the term envisioned.

Computer Science, and even the world in general, is littered with examples of this process in action. What's important is that there's a general consensus of the current meaning of a word.

ivan_gammel14• 1 year ago

API users need to know typical latency bounds, which error codes may be retried, whether an action is atomic or idempotent. HATEOAS gets you none of these things.

Those things aren't always necessary. However API users always need to know which endpoints are available in the current context. This can be done via documentation and client-side business logic implementing it (arguably, more work) or this can be done with HATEOAS (just check if server returned the endpoint).

HTTP 500 retriable sounds like a design error, when you can use HTTP 503 to explicitly say "try again later, it's temporal".

toast0• 1 year ago

What REST has given us is an industry-wide lingua franca. At the basic level, it's a basic understanding of how to map nouns/verbs to HTTP verbs and URLs. Users get to use the basic HTTP response codes. There's still a ton of design and subtlety to all this. Do you really get to do things that are technically allowed, but might break at a typical load balancer (returning bodies with certain error codes)? Is your returning 500 retriable in all cases, with what preferred backoff behavior?

What was wrong with all nouns and verbs map to POST (maybe sometimes GET), and HTTP response codes other than 200 mean your request failed somewhere between the client code and the application server code. HTTP 200 means the application server processed the request and you can check the payload for an application indicator of success, failure, and/or partial success. If you work with enough systems, you end up going back to this, because least common denominator works everywhere.

Either way, anything that isn't ***** SOAP is a good start.

kccqzy2• 1 year ago

It's not just the original REST that usually has no benefits. The industry's reinterpreted version of weak REST also usually has little to no benefits. Who really cares that deleting a resource must necessarily be done with the DELETE HTTP verb rather than simply a POST?

s_ting765• 1 year ago

The DELETE verb exists, there's no reason not to use it.

cryptonector5• 1 year ago

You have to represent the action somehow. And letting proxies understand a wee bit of what's going on is useful. That's how you can have a proxy that lets your users browse the web but not login to external sites, and so on.

naasking10• 1 year ago

To make truly discoverable API you need to specify protocol for endpoints discovery, operations descriptions, help messages etc. Then you need clients that understand your specification, so it is not really a generic client.

Generic clients just need to understand hypermedia and they can discover your API, as long as your API returns hypermedia from its starting endpoint and all other endpoints are transitively linked from that start point.

Let me ask you this: if I gave you an object X in your favourite OO language, could you use your languages reflection capabilities to discover all properties of every object transitively reachable from X, and every method that could be called on X and all objects transitively reachable from X? Could you not even invoke many of those methods assuming the parameter types are mostly standardized objects or have constructors that accept standardized objects?

This is what discoverability via HATEOAS is. True REST can be seen as exporting an object model with reflection capabilities. For clients that are familiar with your API, they are using hypermedia to access known/named properties and methods, and generic clients can use reflection to do the same.

mixedbit9• 1 year ago

Let me ask you this: if I gave you an object X in your favourite OO language, could you use your languages reflection capabilities to discover all properties of every object transitively reachable from X, and every method that could be called on X and all objects transitively reachable from X? Could you not even invoke many of those methods assuming the parameter types are mostly standardized objects or have constructors that accept standardized objects?

Sure this can be done, but I can't see how to build a useful generic app that interacts with objects automatically by discovering the methods and calling them with discovered parameters. For things like debugger, REPL, or some database inspection/manipulation tool, this approach is useful, but for most apps exposed to end users, the UI needs to be aware what the available methods do and need to be intentionally designed to provide intuitive ways of calling the methods.

shadowgovt5• 1 year ago

Generic clients just need to understand hypermedia

Yikes. Nobody wants to implement a browser to create a UI for ordering meals from a restaurant. I'm pretty sure the reason we ended up settling on just tossing JSON blobs around and baking the semantics of them into the client is that we don't want the behavior of the application to get tripped up on whether someone failed to close a <b> tag.

(Besides: practically, for a web-served interface, the client may as well carry semantic understanding because the client came from the server).

Balooga6• 1 year ago

Fielding's paper doesn't provide a complete recipe for building self-discoverable APIs.

But it does though. A HTTP server returns a HTTP response to a request from a browser. The request is a HTML webpage that is rendered to the user with all discoverable APIs visible as clickable links. Welcome to the World Wide Web.

mixedbit9• 1 year ago

You describe how web pages work, web pages are intended for human interactions, APIs are intended for machine interaction. How a generic Python or JavaScript client can discover these APIs? Such clients will request JSON representation of a resource, because JSON is intended for machine consumption, HTML is intended for humans. Representations are equivalent, if you request JSON representations of a /users resource, you get a JSON list. If you request HTML representation of a /users resource you get an HTML list, but the content should be the same. Should you return UI controls for modifying a list as part of the HTML representation? If you do so, your JSON and HTML representations are different, and your Python and JavaScript client still cannot discover what list modification operations are possible, only human can do it by looking at the HTML representation. This is not REST if I understand the paper correctly.

rswail5• 1 year ago

The browser is "generic code" that provides the UX we use all day, every day.

REST includes allowing code to be part of the response from a server, there are the obvious security issues, but the browsers (and the standards) have dealt with a lot of that.

https://ics.uci.edu/~fielding/pubs/dissertation/net_arch_sty...

Sohcahtoa82• 1 year ago

The vision of API that is self discoverable and that works with a generic client is not practical in most cases. [..] Fielding's paper doesn't provide a complete recipe for building self-discoverable APIs. It is an architecture, but the details of how clients should really discover the endpoints and determine what these endpoints are doing is left out of the paper. To make truly discoverable API you need to specify protocol for endpoints discovery, operations descriptions, help messages etc. Then you need clients that understand your specification, so it is not really a generic client

You said what I've thought about REST better than I could have put it.

A true implementation of a REST client is simply not possible. Any client needs to know what all those URLs are going to do. If you suddenly add a new action (like /cansofspam/123/frobnicate), a client won't know what to do with it. The client will need to be updated to add frobnication functionality, or else it just ignores it. At best, it could present a "Frobnicate" button.

This really is why nobody has implemented a REST server or client that actually conforms to Fielding's paper. It's just not realistic to have a client that can truly self-discover an API without being written to know what APIs to expect.

Spivak3• 1 year ago

A true implementation of a REST client is simply not possible

Sure it is, it's just not very interesting to a programmer. It's the browser. That's why there was no need talk about client implementations. And why it's hypermedia driven. It's implicit in the description that it's meant to be discoverable by humans.

AirBnb rediscovered REST when they implemented their Server Driven UI Platform. Once you strip away all the minutiae about resources and URIs the fundamental idea of HATEOS is ship the whole UI from the server and have the client be generic (the browser). Now you can't have the problem where the frontend gets desynced with the backend.

MangoToupe• 1 year ago

Personally I never saw "self-discoverable" as a goal, let alone an achievable one, so I think you're overestimating the ambitions of simple client-design.

Notably, the term "discoverable" doesn't even appear in TFA.

mixedbit9• 1 year ago

From the article: 'The phrase “not being driven by hypertext” in Roy Fielding’s criticism refers to the absence of Hypermedia as the Engine of Application State (HATEOAS) in many APIs that claim to be RESTful. HATEOAS is a fundamental principle of REST, requiring that the client dynamically discover actions and interactions through hypermedia links embedded in server responses, rather than relying on out-of-band knowledge (e.g., API documentation).'

cowsandmilk• 1 year ago

At my FAANG company, the central framework team has taken calling what people do in reality HTTP bindings. https://smithy.io/2.0/spec/http-bindings.html

alkonaut• 1 year ago

Similarly, I call Java programs "Object Oriented programs" despite Alan Kays protests that it isn't at all what Object Orientation was described as in early papers.

The sad truth is that it's the less widely used concept that has to shift terminology, if it comes into wide use for something else or a "diluted" subset of the original idea(s). Maybe the true-OO-people have a term for Kay-like OO these days?

I think the idea of saving "REST" to mean the true Fielding style including HATEOAS and everything is probably as futile as trying to reserve OO to not include C++ or Java.

Traubenfuchs2• 1 year ago

REST(ful) API issues can all be resolved with one addition:

Adding actions to it!

POST api/registration / api/signup? All of this sucks. Posting or putting on api/user? Also doesn‘t feel right.

POST to api/user:signup

Boom! Full REST for entities + actions with custom requests and responses for actions!

How do I make a restful filter call? GET request params are not enough…

You POST to api/user:search, boom!

(I prefer to use the description RESTful API, instead of REST API -everyone fails to implement pure REST anyways, and it‘s unnecessarily limited.)

thaumasiotes5• 1 year ago

What is the problem with posting to /user/signup that posting to /user:signup solves?

Traubenfuchs2• 1 year ago

You might not want a dedicated „Signup“ entity in your model and db.

no_circuit2• 1 year ago

The system won't be able remember why the user was created unless the content of the post includes data saying it was a signup. That's important for any type of reporting like telemetry and billing.

So then one gets to bike-shed if "signup" it is in the request path, query parameters, or the body. Or that since the user resource doesn't exist yet perhaps one can't call a method on it, so it really should be /users:signup (on the users collection, like /users:add).

Provided one isn't opposed to adopting what was bike-shedded elsewhere, there is a fairly well specified way of doing something RESTful, here is a link to its custom methods page: https://google.aip.dev/136. Its approach would be to add information about signup in a request to the post to /users: https://google.aip.dev/133. More or less it describes a way to be RESTful with HTTP/1.1+JSON or gRPC.

dwaltrip3• 1 year ago

I'll never understand why the HATEOAS meme hasn't died.

Is anyone using it? Anywhere?

What kind of magical client can make use of an auto-discoverable API? And why does this client have no prior knowledge of the server they are talking to?

motorest21• 1 year ago

I think OData isn't used, and that's a proper standard and a lower bar to clear. HATEOAS isn't even benefiting from a popular standard, which is both a cause and a result.

_heimdall4• 1 year ago

You realize that anyone using a browser to view HTML is using HATEOS, right? You could probably argue whether SPAs fit the bill, but for sure any server rendered or static site is using HATEOS.

The point isn't that clients must have absolutely no prior knowledge of the server, its that clients shouldn't have to have complete knowledge of the server.

We've grown used to that approach because most of us have been building tightly coupled apps where the frontend knows exactly how the backend works, but that isn't the only way to build a website or web app.

nsonha• 1 year ago

HATEOAS is anything that serves the talking point now apparently

dwaltrip3• 1 year ago

Can you be more specific? What exactly is the partial knowledge? And how is that different from non-conforming APIs?

myaccountonhn• 1 year ago

https://htmx.org/ might be the closest attempt?

rapnie• 1 year ago

https://data-star.dev are taking things a bit further in terms of simplicity and performance and hypermedia concepts. Worth a look.

eadmund3• 1 year ago

I'll never understand why the HATEOAS meme hasn't died.
Is anyone using it? Anywhere?

As I recall ACME (the protocol used by Let’s Encrypt) is a HATEOAS protocol. If so (a cursory glance at RFC 8555 indicates that it may be), then it’s used by almost everyone who serves HTTPS.

Arguably HTTP, when used as it was intended, is itself a HATEOAS protocol.

What kind of magical client can make use of an auto-discoverable API? And why does this client have no prior knowledge of the server they are talking to?

LLMs seem to do well at this.

And remember that ‘auto-discovery’ means different things. A link typed next enables auto-discovery of the next resource (whatever that means); it assumes some pre-existing knowledge in the client of what ‘next’ actually means.

marcosdumay7• 1 year ago

As I recall ACME (the protocol used by Let’s Encrypt) is a HATEOAS protocol.

On this case specifically, everybody's lives are worse because of that.

recursivedoubts13• 1 year ago

Yes. You used it to enter this comment.

I am using it to enter this reply.

The magical client that can make use of an auto-discoverable API is called a "web browser", which you are using right this moment, as we speak.

physicles2• 1 year ago

This is true, but isn’t this quite far away from the normal understanding of API, which is an interface consumed by a program? Isn’t this the P in Application Programming Interface? If it’s a human at the helm, it’s called a User Interface.

didntcheck• 1 year ago

The web browser is just following direct commands. The auto discovery and logic is implemented by my human brain

ehutch792• 1 year ago

So, given a hateos api, and stock firefox (or chrome, or safari, or whatever), it will generate client views with crud functionality?

Let alone ux affordances, branding, etc.

dwaltrip3• 1 year ago

Wait what? So everything is already HATEOAS?

I thought the “problem” was that no one was building proper restful / HATEOAS APIs.

It can’t go both ways.

tshaddox• 1 year ago

I also use Google Maps, YouTube, Spotify, and Figma in the same web browser. But surely most of the functionality of those would not be considered HATEOAS.

kelseyfrog2• 1 year ago

I used it on an enterprise-grade video surveillance system. It was great - basically solved the versioning and permissions problem at the API level. We leveraged other RFCs where applicable.

The biggest issue was that people wanted to subvert the model to "make things easier" in ways that actually made things harder. The second biggest issue is that JSON is not, out of the box, a hypertext format. This makes application/json not suitable for HATEOAS, and forcing some hypertext semantics onto it always felt like a kludge.

elzbardico• 1 year ago

And not everything in reality maps nicely to hypermedia conventions. The problem with REST is trying to shoehorn a lot of problems in a set of abstractions that were initially created for documents.

dingi• 1 year ago

At some point, we built REST clients so generic they could handle nearly any use case. Honestly, building truly RESTful APIs has been easy for ages, just render HTML on the server and send it to the browser. That's 100% REST with no fuss.

The irony is, when people try to implement "pure REST" (as in Level 3 of the Richardson Maturity Model with HATEOAS), they often end up reinventing a worse version of a web browser. So it's no surprise that most developers stop at Level 2—using proper HTTP verbs and resource-based URIs. Full REST just isn't worth the complexity in most real-world applications.

liendolucas• 1 year ago

https://htmx.org/img/memes/dbtohtml.png

LMAO all companies asking for extensive REST API design/implementation experience in their job requirements, along with the lastest hot frontend frameworks.

I should probably fire back by asking if they know what they're asking for, because I'm pretty sure they don't.

theknarf• 1 year ago

Ironically it feels like GraphQL is more RESTful than most REST api's if we want to follow Fielding's paper.

mariusor2• 1 year ago

Except for discoverability, nice URLs, and meaningful HTTP methods.

bnchrch• 1 year ago

Did you just say "discoverability" is an issue with GraphQL with a straight face?

There are plenty of valid criticisms, but that is not one, in fact thats where it shines.

osigurdson8• 1 year ago

We collectively glazed over Roy Fielding's dissertation, didn't really see the point, liked the sound of the word "REST" and used it to describe whatever we wanted to do with http / json. Sorry, Roy, but you can keep HATEOAS - no one is going to take that from you.

pradn4• 1 year ago

REST isn’t about exposing your internal object model over HTTP — it’s about building distributed systems that behave like the web.

I think I finally understand what Fielding is getting at. His REST principles boil down to allowing dynamic discovery of verbs for entities that are typed only by their media types. There's a level of indirection to allow for dynamic discovery. And there's a level of abstraction in saying entities are generic media objects. These two conceptual leaps allow the REST API to be used in a more dynamic, generic way - with benefits at the API level that the other levels of the web stack has ("client decoupling, evolvability, dynamic interaction").

ale• 1 year ago

In what context would a user discover parts of a REST API dynamically?

pradn4• 1 year ago

In the simple (albeit niche) case, a UI could populate a list of buttons based on the URIs/verbs that the REST API returns. So the UI would be totally dynamic based on the backend - and so, work pretty generically across REST APIs.

But for a client, UI or otherwise, to make use of a dynamic set of URIs/verbs would require it to either look for a specific keyword (hard coding the intents it can satisfy) or be able to semantically understand the API (which is hard, requires a human).

Oddly, all this stuff is full circle with the AI stuff. The MCP protocol is designed to give AIs text-based descriptions of APIs, so they can reason about how to use them.

ceving• 1 year ago

It is not sufficient to crawl the API. The client also needs to know how to display the forms, which collect the data for the links presented by the API. If you want to crawl the API you also have the crawl the whole client GUI.

0x445442• 1 year ago

In my experience REST is just a code word for a distributed glob of function calls which communicate via JSON. It's a development and maintenance nightmare.

nchmy8• 1 year ago

The article is seemingly accurate, but isn't particularly useful as it is written in FAR too technical of a style.

If anyone wants to learn more about all of this, https://htmx.org/essays and their free https://hypermedia.systems book are wonderful.

You could also check out https://data-star.dev for an even better approach to this.

layer84• 1 year ago

This doesn’t provide any good arguments for why Roy Fielding’s conception should be taken as the gospel of how things should be done. At best, it points out that what we call REST now isn’t what Roy Fielding wanted.

Furthermore, it doesn’t explain how Roy Fielding’s conception would make sense for non-interactive clients. The fact that it doesn’t make sense is a large part of why virtually nobody is following it.

nchmy8• 1 year ago

Why doesn't fielding's conception make sense for non-interactive clients?

layer84• 1 year ago

Take this quote: “A REST API should be entered with no prior knowledge beyond the initial URI (bookmark) and set of standardized media types that are appropriate for the intended audience (i.e., expected to be understood by any client that might use the API). From that point on, all application state transitions must be driven by client selection of server-provided choices that are present in the received representations or implied by the user’s manipulation of those representations.”

If the client application only understands media types and isn’t supposed to know anything about the interrelationships of the data or possible actions on it, and there is no user that could select from the choices provided by the server, then it’s not clear how the client can do anything purposeful.

Surely, an automated client, or rather its developer, needs a model (a schema) of what is possible to do with the API. Roy Fieldings doesn’t address that aspect at all. At best, his REST API would provide a way for the client to map its model to the actual server calls to make, based on configuration information provided by the server as “hypertext”. But the point of such an indirection is unclear, because the configuration information itself would have to follow a schema known and understood by the client, so again wouldn’t be RESTful in Roy Fielding’s sense.

People are trying to fill in the blanks of what Roy Fielding might have meant, but in the end it just doesn’t make a lot of sense for what REST APIs are used in practice.

Devilspawn6666• 1 year ago

In a non-interactive case, what is supposed to be reading a response and deciding which links to do some something with or what to do with them?

Let's say you've got a non-interactive program to get daily market close prices. A response returns a link labelled "foobarxyz", which is completely different to what the API returned yesterday and the day before.

How is your program supposed to magically know what to do? (without your input/interaction)

_heimdall4• 1 year ago

What's often missed when this topic comes up is the question of who the back end API is intended for.

REST and HATEOAS are beneficial when the consumer is meant to be a third party that doesn't directly own the back end. The usual example is a plain old HTML page, the end user of that API is the person using a browser. MCP is a more recent example, that protocol is only needed because they want agents talking to APIs they don't own and need a solution for discoverability and interpretability in a sea of JSON RPC APIs.

When the API consumer is a frontend app written specifically for that backend, the benefits of REST often just don't outweigh the costs. It takes effort to design a more generic, better documented and specified API. While I don't like using tools like tRPC in production, its hugely useful for me when prototyping for much the same reason, I'm building both ends of the app and its faster to ignore separation of concerns.

edit: typo

a3w• 1 year ago

*HATEOAS

recursivedoubts13• 1 year ago

agree very strongly and think it goes even deeper than that!

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

https://htmx.org/essays/hypermedia-clients

ApeWithCompiler• 1 year ago

I tried to follow the approach with hypermedia and discoverable resources/actions in my hobby projects. But I "failed" at the point that this would mean additional HTTP calls from a client to "discover" a resource/its actions. Given the latency of a HTTP call, relativly seen, this was not conclusive for me.

pharaohgeek• 1 year ago

ElasticSearch and OpenSearch are certainly egregiously guilty of this. Their API is an absolute nightmare to work with if you don't have a supported native client. Why such a popular project doesn't have an easy-to-use OpenAPI spec document in this day and age is beyond me.

recursivedoubts13• 1 year ago

This is a very good and detailed review of the concepts of REST, kudos to the author.

One additional point I would add is that making use of the REST-ful/HATEOAS pattern (in the original sense) requires a conforming client to make the juice worth the squeeze:

https://htmx.org/essays/hypermedia-clients

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

kgwxd• 1 year ago

Unless you really read and followed the paper, just call it a web api and tell your sales people to do the same. Calling it REST makes you sound like a manager that hasn't done any actual dev in 15 years.

mschaef• 1 year ago

The core problem it addresses is client-server coupling. There are probably countless projects where a small change in a server’s URI structure required a coordinated (and often painful) deployment of multiple client applications. A HATEOAS-driven approach directly solves this by decoupling the client from the server’s namespace. This addresses the quality of evolvability.

Not sure I agree with this. All it does is move the coupling problem around. A client that doesn't understand where to find a URL in a document (or even which URL's are available for what purpose within that document) is just as bad as a client that assumes the wrong URL structure.

At some point, the client of an API needs to understand the semantics of what that API provides and how/where it provides those semantics. Moving it from a URL hierarchy to a document structure doesn't provide a huge amount of added value. (Particularly in a world where essentially all of the server API's are defined in terms of URL patterns routing to handlers. This is explicit hardcoded encouragement to think in a style in opposition to the HATEOAS philosophy.)

I also tend to think that the widespread migration of data formats from XML to JSON has worked against "Pure" REST/HATEOAS. XML had/has the benefit of a far richer type structure when compared to JSON. While JSON is easier to parse on a superficial level, doing things like identifying times, hyperlinks, etc. is more difficult due to the general lack of standardization of these things. JSON doesn't provide enough native and widespread representations of basic concepts needed for hypertext.

(This is one of those times I'd love some counterexamples. Aside from the original "present hypertext documents to humans via a browser" use case, I'd love to read more about examples of successful programmatic API's written in a purely HATEOAS style.)

physicles2• 1 year ago

This is what I don’t understand either.

/user/123/orders

How is this fundamentally different than requesting /user/123 and assuming there’s a link called “orders” in the response body?

csb6• 1 year ago

With an HTML body the link will be displayed as content and so will be directly clickable. But if the body is JSON then the client has to somehow generate a UI for the user, which requires some kind of interpretation of the data, so I don’t understand that case.

pjmlp• 1 year ago

Basically JSON-RPC really, and a better use of HTTP verbs, most of the time.

commandlinefan2• 1 year ago

Most databases aren't relational, either, in the sense that Codd defined relational. They are, instead, useful.

gabesullice2• 1 year ago

The thing to internalize about "true" REST is that HN (and the rest of the web) is really a RESTful web service. You visit the homepage, a hypermedia format is delivered to a generic client (your browser), and its resources (pages, sections, profiles, etc) can all be navigated to by following links.

Links update when you log in or out, indicating the state of your session. Vote up/down links appear or disappear based on one's profile. This is HATEOAS.

Link relations can be used to alter how the client (browser) interprets the link—a rel="stylesheet" causes very different behavior from rel="canonical".

JavaScript provides even provides "code on-demand" as it's called in Fielding's paper.

From that perspective, REST is incredible. REST is extremely flexible, scalable, evolvable, etc. It is the pattern that powers the web.

Now, it's an entirely different story when it come to what many people call REST APIs, which are often nothing like HN. They cannot be consumed by a generic client. They are not interlinked. They don't ship code on-demand.

Is "REST" to blame? No. Few people have time or reason to build a client as powerful as the browser to consume their SaaS product's API.

But even building a truly generic client isn't the hardest thing about building RESTful APIs—the hardest thing is that the web depends entirely on having a human-in-the-loop and your standard API integration's purpose is to eliminate having a human in the loop.

For example, a human reads the link text saying "Log in" or "Reset password" and interprets that text to understand the state of the system (they do not have an authenticated session). And a human can reinterpret a redesigned webpage with links in a new location, but trivial clients can't reinterpret a refactored JSON object (or XML for that matter).

The folly is in thinking that there's some design pattern out there that's better than REST without understanding that the actual problem to be solved by that elusive, perfect paradigm is how you'll be able to refactor your API when your API's clients will likely be bodged-together JS programs whose authors dug through JSON for the URL they needed and then hard-coded it in a curl command instead of conscientiously and meticulously reading documentation and semantically looking up the URL at runtime, follows redirects, and handles failures gracefully.

tacitusarc• 1 year ago

See https://stackoverflow.com/a/29520505/771665

The term has caused so much bikeshedding and unnecessary confusion.

gabesullice2• 1 year ago

If you are building a public API for external developers you don’t control, invest in HATEOAS. If you are building a backend for a single frontend controlled by your own team, a simpler RPC-style API may be the more practical choice.

My conclusion is exactly the opposite. In-house developers can be expected (read: cajoled) to do things the "right" way, like follow links at runtime. You can run tests against your client and server. Internally, flexible REST makes independent evolution of the front end and back end easy.

Externally, you must cater to somebody who hard-coded a URL into their curl command that runs on cron and whose code can't tolerate the slightest deviation from exactly what existed when the script was written. In that case, an RPC-like call is great and easy to document. Increment from `/v1/` to `/v2/`, writer a BC layer between them and move on.

mring33621• 1 year ago

r/noshitsherlock

for a lot of places, POST with JSON body is REST

Scubabear68• 1 year ago

I have always said that HATEOAS starting with “HATE” is highly descriptive of my attitude toward it.

It is a fundamentally flawed concept that does not work in the real world. Full stop.

phamilton• 1 year ago

I think we should focus less on API schemas and more on just copying how browsers work.

Some examples:

It should be far more common for http clients to have well supported and heavily used Cookie jar implementations.

We should lean on Accept headers much more, especially with multiple mime-types and/or wildcards.

Http clients should have caching plugins to automatically respect caching headers.

There are many more examples. I've seen so much of HTTP reimplemented on top of itself over the years, often with poor results. Let's stop doing that. And when all our clients are doing those parts right, I suspect our APIs will get cleaner too.

kamranjon• 1 year ago

I am wondering if anyone can resolve this misunderstanding of REST for me…

If the backend provides a _links map which contains “orders” for example in the list - doesn’t the front end need to still understand what that key represents? Is there another piece I am missing that would actually decouple the front end from the backend?

spankalee• 1 year ago

Good.

Strict HATEOAS is bad for an API as it leads to massively bloated payloads. We _should_ encode information in the API documentation or a meta endpoint so that we don't have to send tons of extra information with every request.

dekhn• 1 year ago

I see a lot of people who read Fielding's thesis and found it interesting.

I did not find it interesting. I found it excessively theoretical and proscriptive. It led to a lot of people arguing pedantically over things that just weren't important.

I just want to exchange JSON-structured messages over HTTP, using the least amount of HTTP required to implement request and response. I'm also OK with protocol buffers over grpc, or really any decent serialization technology over any well-implemented transport. Sometimes it's CRUD, sometimes it's inference, sometimes it's direct actions on a server.

Hmm. I shoudl write a thesis. JSMOHTTP (pronounced "jizmo-huttup")

maliciouspickle• 1 year ago

i completely agree with you. the authors approach seems complex and unnecessary. my basic expectation when I see something labeled as a REST API is:

1. i can submit a request via HTTP

2. data is returned as JSON by a response

3. the most minimal amount of HTTP/Pagination necessary is required

rswail5• 1 year ago

I love all the comments here that you can't build a proper UX/UI with a "perfect" REST API even though browsers do it all day, every day.

REST includes code-on-demand as part of the style, HTTP allows for that with the "Link" header and HTML via <script>.

lotyrin• 1 year ago

HATEOAS + Document Type Description which includes (ideally internationalized) natural language description in addition to machine readable is what MCP should have been.

cryptonector5• 1 year ago

The core problem it addresses is client-server coupling. There are probably countless projects where a small change in a server’s URI structure required a coordinated (and often painful) deployment of multiple client applications. A HATEOAS-driven approach directly solves this by decoupling the client from the server’s namespace. This addresses the quality of evolvability.

Eh, "a small change in a server’s URI structure" breaks links, so already you're in trouble.

But sure, embedding [local-parts of] URIs in the contents (or headers) exchanged is indeed very useful.

spelunker• 1 year ago

Ah yes - nobody is doing REST correctly. My favorite form of bikeshedding.

renerick2• 1 year ago

Htmx essays have already been mentioned, so here are my thoughts on the matter. I feel like to have a productive discussion of REST and HATEOAS, we must first agree on the basics. Repeating my own comment from a couple of weeks ago, H stands for hypermedia, and hypermedia is a type of media, that uses common format for representing some server-driven state and embedding hypermedia controls which are presented by back-end agnostic hypermedia client to a user for discoverability and interaction.

As such, JSON driven APIs can't be REST, since there is no common format for representing hypermedia controls, which means that there's no way to implement hypermedia client which can present those controls to the user and facilitate interactions. Is there such implmentation? Yes, HTML is the hypermedia, <input>s and <button>s are controls and browsers are the clients. REST and HATEOAS is designed for the humans, and trying to somehow combine it with machine-to-machine interaction results in awkward implementations, blurry definitions and overcomplication.

Richardson maturity model is a clear indication of those problems, I see it as an admission of "well, there isn't much practicality in doing proper REST for machine-to-machine comms, but that's fine, you can only do some parts of it and it's still counts". I'm not saying we shouldn't use its ideas, resource-based URLs are nice, using feature of HTTP is reasonable, but under the name REST it leads to constant arguments between the "dissertation" crowd and "the industry has moved on" crowd. The worst/best part is both those crowds are totally right and this argument will continue for as long as we use HTTP

renerick2• 1 year ago

I felt the need to clarify this point:

As such, JSON driven APIs can't be REST

I made it sound like JSON APIs can't be REST in principle, which is of course not true. If someone were to create hypermedia control specification for JSON and implement hypermedia client for it, it would of course would match the definition. But since we don't have such specification and compliant client at this time, we can't do REST as it is defined

k__• 1 year ago

Hot take: HATEOAS only works when humans are navigating.

bazoom42• 1 year ago

Just call it a HTTP API and everyone is happy. People forget REST was never intended for API’s in the first place. REST was designed for information systems navigated by humans, not programs.

beders• 1 year ago

I always urge software architects (are they still around?) and senior engineers in charge of APIs to think very carefully about the consumers of the API.

If the only consumer is your own UI, you should use a much more integrated RPC style that helps you be fast. Forget about OpenAPI etc: Use a tool or library that makes it dead simple to provide data the UI needs.

If you have a consumer outside your organization: a RESTish API it is.

If your consumer is supposed to be generic and can "discover" your API, RESTful is the way to go.

But no one writes generic ones anymore. We already have the ultimate one: the browser.

HumblyTossed2• 1 year ago

Didn't we go through all this years ago and determined that we should invent a new term - REST-like and so were able to put this all to bed?

rendall3• 1 year ago

Every dev generation writes this essay, so this pops up again every 5 years or so.

have-a-break• 1 year ago

Worse, most if not all "REST" apps have security vulnerabilities because of how browser front-ends handle authentication.

To handle authentication "properly" you have to use cookies or sessions which inheritly make apps not RESTful.

pipes• 1 year ago

I just call them http APIs. Is this too far wrong? Actually a genuine question.

temporallobe• 1 year ago

Some of this is sensible. I especially like the idea of an interactive starting point which gives you useful links and info, but I can see how that would be difficult with more complex calls — showing examples and providing rich documentation would be difficult. Otherwise, just follow the recommendations for REST verbs (so what if they mostly map to CRUD?), and document your API well. Tools like Swagger really make this quite easy.

JaggerJo• 1 year ago

REST almost never is worth it. It’s a nice idea, but in practice things often are more complicated.

API quality is often not relevant to the business after it passes the “mostly works” bar.

I’ll just use plain http or RPC when it’s not important and spend more time on things that make a difference.

gsibble• 1 year ago

I built a company that actually did implement HATEOS in our API. It was a nightmare. So much processing time was spent on every request setting up all the URLs and actions that could be taken. And no one used it for anything anyways. Our client libraries used it but we had full control over them anyways and if anything, it made the libraries more complex.

While I agree it's an interesting idea in theory, it's unnecessary in the real world and has a lot of downsides.

coolhand2120• 1 year ago

I politely pointed out that this previous submission "Stop using REST for state synchronization" (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43997286) was not in fact ReST at all, but just an HTTP API and I was down voted for it. You would think that programming is a safe place to be pedantic.

It's all HTTP API unless you're actually doing ReST in which case you're probably doing it wrong.

ReST and HATEOAS are great ideas until you actually stop and think about it, then you'll find that they only work as ideas in some idealized world that real HTTP clients do not exist in.

deathanatos• 1 year ago

I just spent a good portion of the day trying to figure out how GCP's allegedy "RESTful" (it's not) API names resources. If only there was a universal identifier for resources…

But no, a service account in GCP has no less than ~4 identifiers. And the API endpoint I wanted to call needed to know which resource, so the question then is "which of the 4 identifiers do I feed it?" The right answer? None of them.

The "right" answer is that you need to manually build a string, a concatenate a bunch of static pieces with the project ID and the object's ID to form a more IDer ID. So now we need the project ID … and projects have two of those. So the right answer is that exactly 1 of the 8 different permutations works (if we don't count the constant string literals involved in the string building).

Just give me a URI, and then let me pass that URI, FFS.

3cats-in-a-coat• 1 year ago

Indeed, and I find it funny that the debate even exists.

BrenBarn• 1 year ago

Furthermore, the initial cognitive overhead of building a truly hypermedia-driven client was perceived as a significant barrier. It felt easier for a developer to read documentation and hardcode a URI template like /users/{id}/orders than to write a client that could dynamically parse a _links section and discover the “orders” URI at runtime.

It "was perceived as" a barrier because it is a barrier. It "felt easier" because it is easier. The by-the-book REST principles aren't a good cost-benefit tradeoff for common cases.

It is like saying that your microwave should just have one button that you press to display a menu of "set timer", "cook", "defrost", etc., and then one other button you use to select from the menu, and then when you choose one it shows another menu of what power level and then another for what time, etc. It's more cumbersome than just having some built-in buttons and learning what they do.

I actually own a device that works in that one-button way. It's an OBD engine code reader. It only has two buttons, basically "next" and "select" and everything is menus. Even for a use case that basically only has two operations ("read the codes" and "clear a code"), it is noticeably cumbersome.

Also, the fact that people still suggest it's indispensable to read Fielding's dissertation is the kind of thing that should give everyone pause. If the ideas are good there should be many alternative statements for general audiences or different perspectives. No one says that you don't truly understand physics unless you read Newton's Principia.

JackSlateur• 1 year ago

How does hateoas work with parameters ?

I mean .. ok, you have the bookmark uri, aka the entrypoint

From there, you get links of stuff. The client still need to "know" their identifiers but anyway

But the params of the routes .. and I am not only speaking of their type, I am also speaking of their meaning .. how would that work ?

I think it cannot, so the client code must "know" them, again via out of band mecanisms.

And at this point, the whole stuff is useless and we just use openapi

dolmen2• 1 year ago

HATEOAS might make a come back as it might be useful to expose an API to AI agents that would browse a service.

On the other hand, agents could as well understand an OpenAPI document, as the description of each path/schema can be much more verbose than HATEOAS. There is a reason why OpenAPI-style API are favored: less verbosity of payload. If cost of agents is based on their consumption/production of tokens, verbosity matters.

ChrisMarshallNY• 1 year ago

Eh. I won't write "pure" REST, because it's difficult to use, and I don't know if I have ever seen a tool that uses it as such. I know why it was designed that way, but I have never needed that.

I tend to use REST-like methods to select mode (POST, GET, DELETE, PATCH, etc.), but the data is usually a simple set of URL arguments (or associated data). I don't really get too bent out of shape about ensuring the data is an XML/JSON/Whatever match for the model structure. I'll often use it coming out, but not going in.

bertails• 1 year ago

"REST" is our industry's most successful collective delusion: everyone knows it's wrong, everyone knows we're using it wrong, and somehow that works better than being right.

bps4484• 1 year ago

"Reductio Ad Roy Feldium" is the internet addage[1] that as in a hacker news discussion about a rest api grows, the probabilty someone cites roy felding's dissertation approaches 1. I'm glad this post cut right to the chase!

[1] ok it's not an internet adage. I invented it and joke with friends about it

darqis• 1 year ago

I don't understand why no one or barely anyone is using graphql. It's the evolution of all that REST crap.

  query ($name: String!) {
    greeting(where: {name: $name}) {
      response
    }
  }

  mutation ($input: CreatePostInput!) {
    createPost(input: $input) {
      id
      createTime
      title
      content
      tags {
        id
        slug
        name
      }
      
    }
  }

and so on, instead of having to manually glue together responses and relations.

It's literally SQL over the wire without needed to write SQL.

The payload is JSON, the response is JSON. EZ.

MrJohz• 1 year ago

I've not done much with GraphQL myself, but a lot of my colleagues have and have all sworn off it except in very specific circumstances.

My impression is that it's far too flexible. Connecting it up to a database means you're essentially running arbitrary SQL queries, which means whoever is writing the GraphQL queries also needs to know how those queries will get translated to SQL, and therefore what the database structure/performance characteristics are going to be. That's a pain if you're using GraphQL internally and now your queries are spread out, potentially just multiple codebases. But if you exclude the GraphQL API publicly, now you don't even know what the queries are that people are going to want to use.

Mostly these days we use RPC-style APIs for internal APIs where we can control everything and be really precise about what gets called when and where. And then more "traditional" REST/resource-oriented endpoints for public APIs where we might have more general queries.

stephenlf• 1 year ago

A REST API should not be dependent on any single communication protocol, though its successful mapping to a given protocol may be dependent on the availability of metadata, choice of methods, etc. In general, any protocol element that uses a URI for identification must allow any URI scheme to be used for the sake of that identification. [Failure here implies that identification is not separated from interaction.]

What the heck does this mean? Does it mean that my API isn’t REST if it can’t interpret “http://example.com/path/to/resource” in the same way it interprets “COM<example>::path.to.resource”? Is it saying my API should support HTTP, FTP, SMB, and ODBC all the same? What am I missing?

webprofusion• 1 year ago

Purist ideas rarely survive contact with reality, or something.

Likewise if the founders of the web took one look at a full on React based site they would shriek in horror at what's now the defacto standard.

somat• 1 year ago

As far as I know the only actual rest implementation, as Fielding envisioned it, a system where you send the entire representational state of the program with each request is the system Fielding coined the term REST to describe. The WEB.

Has any other system done this? where you send the whole application for each state with each state. project xandu?

I do find it funny how Fielding basically said "hey look at the web, isn't that a weird way to structure a program, lets talk about it." and every one sort of suffered a collective mental brain fart and replied "oh you mean http, got it"

phendrenad2• 1 year ago

I think that all of the unemployed CS grads are rediscovering the "best practices" of the last 40 years in lieu of working. Well, just remember, every HATEOAS-conforming REST API, every chaos-monkey-enabled Microservice-Oriented Architecture, every app that someone spent tone of time hacking down the cyclomatic complexity score, every meticulously UML-diagrammed four-tier architecture, has had their main engineers laid off and replaced by a crack team of junior engineers who adulterated it down to spaghetti code. In the post-AI world, features talk, architecture walks.

nirui• 1 year ago

Not weird at all if people don't strictly follow a standard.

The world of programming, just like the real world, has a lot of misguided doctrines that looked really good on paper, but not on application.

For example:

    "_links": {
      ....
      "cancel": { "href": "/orders/123/cancel", "method": "POST" }
    }

Why "POST"?

And what POST do you send? A bare POST with no data, or with parameters in it's body?

What if you also want to GET the status of cancellation? Change the type of `method` to an array so you can `"method": ["POST", "GET"]`?

What if you want to cancel the cancellation? Do you do `POST /orders/123/cancel/cancel HTTP/...`, or `DELETE /orders/123/cancel HTTP/...`?

So, people adopt, making an originally very pure and "based" standard into something they can actually use. After all, all of those things are meant to be productive, rather than ideological.

octo888• 1 year ago

Have a /cancellation resource. This could be returned by /cancel or it could just be linked to directly

Now you have a noun and some of confusion goes away regarding GET and DELETE etc

jasonm23• 1 year ago

Turn back lest you be dragged into the RESTy bikeshed

globular-toast• 1 year ago

This seems to mostly boil down to including links rather than just IDs and having the client "just know" how to use those IDs.

Django Rest Framework seems to do this by default. There seems very little reason not to include links over hardcoding URLs in clients. Imagine just being able to restructure your backend and clients just follow along. No complicated migrations etc. I suspect many people just live with crappy backends because it's too difficult to coordinate the rollout of a v2 API.

However, this doesn't cover everything. There's still a ton of "out of band" information shared between client and server. Maybe there's a way to embed Swagger-style docs directly into an API and truly decouple server and client, bit it would seem to take a lot more than just using links over IDs.

Still I think there's nothing to lose by using links over IDs. Just do it on your next API (or use something like DRF that does it for you).

collyw• 1 year ago

Fine. They are not actually RESTful. But does it actually matter?

l0b0• 1 year ago

It's mostly just semantic drift. "REST" is less of a mouthful than "JSON over HTTP". Nobody ever realised the potential of discoverability.

sporkland• 1 year ago

As someone that criticized a number of their employers API's for not being sufficiently ReSTful especially with regards to HatEoS, I eventually realized the challenge is the clients. App developers and client developers mostly just want to deal with structured objects that they've built fixed function UX around (including the top level) and desire constructing URLs on the client. It takes a special kind of developer to desire building special mini-browsers everywhere that would require hateos and from the server side.

I think LLM's are going to be the biggest shift in terms of actually driving more truly ReSTful APIs, though LLM's are probably equally happy to take ReST-ish responses, they are able to effectively deal with arbitrary self describing payloads.

MCP at it's core seems to design around the fact that you've got an initial request to get the schema and then the payload, which works great for a lot of our not-quite-ReST API's but you could see over time just doing away with the extra ceremony and doing it all in one request and effectively moving back in the direction of true ReST.

hosh• 1 year ago

My biggest takeaway from Roy Fielding's dissertation wasn't how to construct a RESTful architecture or what is the one true REST, but how to understand any computer architecture -- particularly their constraints -- in order to design and implement appropriate systems. I can easily identify anti-patterns (even in implementations) because they violate the constraints which in turns, takes away from the properties of the architecture. This also quickly allows me to evaluate and understand libraries, runtimes, topologies, and so forth.

I used to get caught up in what is REST and what is not, and that misses the point. It's similar to how Christopher Alexander's ideas pattern languages gets used in a way now that misses the point. Alexander was cited in introductory chapter of Fielding's dissertation. These are all very big ideas with broad applicability and great depth.

When combined with Promise Theory, this gives a dynamic view of systems.

cryptos• 1 year ago

The big problem I see with the practical adoption of REST principles is that a human can easily intpret a document and pick the desired transation (e.g. follow a link), but a program can not so easily do that. Maybe in the age of AI it becomes more realistic, but most of the time some "RESTful" back-end is used by a certain front-end application. What is needed is basically more like RPC. Maybe SOAP was closer to what we actually do and need. The specification and code generation was much better than what we have now with mediocre OpenAPI code generators.

Maybe gRPC or something like that will fill the gap ...

swiezy2• 1 year ago

There's a decent chance listing endpoints were changed to POST to support complex filters

why not do everything in POST?

dSebastien• 1 year ago

A few years ago I spent an unreasonable amount of time creating a RESTful API design guide for my employer. The goal was to standardize the way APIs would be created for all systems. We argued over HATEOAS, true REST with hypermedia, custom media types, status codes etc.

We ended up with what I consider to be a solid design guide rooted in the correct use of Web standards. Not REST but RESTful. Clear and understandable, uniform, etc.

At the end of the day though the real challenge was more to make people adhere to those conventions. Why? Because most developers don't care at all. They want to finish their "Agile" sprint on time. They don't care about architecture, correctness, enterprise-wide homogeneity etc. Beyond the lack of ONE actual standard, that's the other real major problem.

https://github.com/NationalBankBelgium/REST-API-Design-Guide...

Most RESTful APIs aren't really RESTful

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