this post was submitted on 20 Nov 2024
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Programming
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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.