this post was submitted on 20 Nov 2024
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I'd Agree in most cases, but not in this one.
Rigor in definitions allows us to express a lot of complex things in a compact form. this allows us to treat "Cars" as something different than "Motorcycles" while both a motorized vehicles.
the same is true for REST-API and other API-Types, while all of them are just a means to allow services to exchange data, they tell us a lot about how this exchange happens and what to expect, but only if we use the words in a way that they represent the concept they were meant to represent. Otherwise we end up with meaningless buzz words like "rest", "agile", "scrum", "artificial intelligence" and so forth, instead of meaningful terms found in the jargon of other engineering disciplines like "magnetism", "gravity" or "motor".
We're well past that. I would probably care more if the original idea behind REST solved a real problem, but it doesn't. It's architecture astronaut stuff.
If REST is just about using HTTP verbs and status codes smarter, and sending the payload in JSON, I'm good to leave it at that. It's useful.
Besides, the original definition is not reflective of real world needs - which is why it’s morphed to something else.
Meh. There's plenty of room in the gray zone between "car" and "motorcycle" where things like this or this can exist. The botanical world has worked very hard to create rigorous definitions of fruits and vegetables only to be completely ignored by cooks. The culinary world in general has done just fine for centuries without rigorously specifying whether taco's are sandwiches and cereal is a soup.
As long as it is generally understood what people mean by a word when they use it everything will be mostly fine. REST is an understood term, whether the inventor of the term meant something else by it is immaterial.
my problem is not with words changing there meaning its with words losing meaning.
rest api today means any api ontop of http where response bodies are json, but nothing more, we can't get much more general when talking about web apis than that, "rest" is almost meaningless and we don't have a new word describing APIs that adhere to the constraints of what restful meant, but those are a useful tool for building web applications that can easily be used by a web browser. no matter if you like fielding-rest-style-apis or not, you lost the ability to call them by a name and gained murky mumbo jumbo for it.
I'm my observation, as a nearly-30-year-vet in the field, it's due to the same factors as always. The technology doesn't enforce the standard. So people do any fucking thing they want because they honestly don't know any better.
I'm working on an app right now. On one of the controllers there is a single endpoint, out of about 30 (which should fucking tell you something right there) that conforms to restful standards. Every single other one of them is wrong. Because folks didn't know better and leaders didn't lead/teach/know any better themselves.