[jstimpfle]

I've come to avoid OO and use only freestanding functions where possible mostly because of this problem. So often it ends up in a syntactic distinction that is absolutely meaningless otherwise.

I use some OO to make abstract datatypes in languages that are inherently OO, but I think the explicit virtual table approach in C or the type classes approach in Haskell are much cleaner.

Lately I had to make a REST API which is basically a distributed Object-oriented interface. I think I managed to get it done with compromises, but I'm not happy. Another idea would be to make a procedural interface first and then make a REST API on top if needed. But I have some doubts it can work out practically.

[unclebucknasty]

Some would call your procedural interfaces services and map your REST API directly to publicly available service methods.

[olau]

Ah, REST.

An API is there because someone in the other end wants to do something. If you don't design it but just slap REST on top of your data, then you're not doing that person a favour.

[jstimpfle]

Well you can still "design REST" on top, right? But it could mean some duplicated efforts.

Actually, after having tried a few times, I'm pretty sure I don't want to put REST ideas at the center of my architecture. You just happen to need a network transport, and not even in all cases (debugging for example). And an existing model is never going to be able to represent all the concepts of your application domain. This means that you need to build your own representations.

In theory there is a point of using a standardized object protocol which can represent some CRUD use cases. But from my limited experience I think it breaks pretty quickly, to the point where I can use only GET and POST.

Using protocol layers of increasing specificity may make it easier to use existing tooling with data exchanges. For example, many APIs use HTTP statuscodes as a more coarse-grained version of the return codes in the body (in an ad-hoc format). Also caching is often brought up as an example where you want to buy in to a standardized protocol.

But some APIs don't buy in, like Facebook, which reportedly returns 200 OK always. It seems like a lot of best-effort work with little returns to me as well. But I don't know - I'm not a professional business software guy.