[pluma]

The funny part is that technically Rails and Rails-inspired REST frameworks get it wrong. They're just exposing the server-side models via REST interface and the server-side models in turn expose the database's tables. That's REST by the books but not particularly useful unless all you're interested is exposing your database tables to the clients.

Automagic REST APIs may be easier to do with "RESTful" MVC frameworks but what you really want is a domain-oriented REST API. But I digress.

[techpeace]

Here's a handy test to determine if two technological terms mean the same thing: are they used interchangeably? If I said to someone, "oh that looks like you need a SOAPful interface," would they assume that I meant RESTful? Probably not, since they're two different technologies. The move to REST was actually inspired by the perceived deficiencies in WSDL and SOAP.

> The funny part is that technically Rails and Rails-inspired REST frameworks get it wrong.

Well, that's a bit tangential to my original point. I wasn't claiming that you specifically liked the way it was implemented, just that Rails, and thus the Ruby community, was responsible for its popularity. Despite the length of this thread, neither of you has managed to debunk that claim with anything resembling evidence.

Find a reference to Tomcat using REST before 2007, and give us the link. I'd bet you can't, since Rails was the first major web framework to implement REST.

> REST hit it big with the www, www is REST's killer app.

Since REST was invented in 2000, and the web itself had been around for a bit before that, I fail to see how this could be true.

[eevilspock]

"The World Wide Web itself represents the largest implementation of a system conforming to the REST architectural style."

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Representational_state_transfe...

"The first edition of REST was developed between October 1994 and August 1995, primarily as a means for communicating Web concepts as we wrote the HTTP/1.0 specification and the initial HTTP/1.1 proposal. It was iteratively improved over the next five years and applied to various revisions and extensions of the Web protocol standards."

- Roy T, Fielding, Architectural Styles and the Design of Network-based Software Architectures, 2000

Most interesting is Roy's presentation at RailsConf Europe in 2007 (http://roy.gbiv.com/talks/200709_fielding_rest.pdf):

Use your brains!

- don’t design-by-buzzword

- don’t believe everything you read