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by swax
3830 days ago
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Even if REST was a standard and no one ever argued about it, I still wouldn't use it. It is needless overhead designed by a PhD to solve problems I haven't encountered for 15 years. API traversal sounds nice, but who uses it? Has the benefit been realized or is it still just theory? With a simple JSON RPC API I can still transmit objects representing state. Like you said it's not complicated. Has it crossed your mind that REST is maybe more trouble than it's worth? |
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I've built hypertext APIs, and they worked really well.
We had a(n overly) complex domain model where most of the complexity was around managing a permissions model for access to resources. We tried a whole bunch of ways to represent the actions available to end users, but the only one that worked really well was to advertise a URI when you could do something, and to omit it when you couldn't.
All the nightmarish logic was safely hidden behind the uniform interface. Clients only needed to know that they should follow links, and that the absence of a link meant that a resource wasn't available to them because reasons. It was a beautifully natural mapping of a difficult problem domain into a simple consumption model.
As a bonus, we could change URI structures around when we felt like it, and our clients never missed a beat, because they always followed links from a well-known entry point.
It's not always the right choice, there is plenty of room for simple RPC, but for workflows, and dynamic discovery of resources ReST works a treat.