| > Yeah, Roy. It's called being an effective communicator. An author uses technical jargon and concepts familiar to his intended audience. Fielding's intended audience for his thesis is other people with PhDs. His writing was perfectly cogent if you have this level of knowledge. The people who really failed REST are the blog authors who didn't have the necessary background to evaluate the REST constraints and started talking about REST despite not understanding half of the thesis. This is what diluted the term. > Fielding, in my estimation, seems principally concerned with three things with regard to REST You missed the central importance of hypermedia. > Everything else is left as an exercise for the reader. That's like saying an RPC library leaves designing and building your specific API up to the reader. Of course it does, it has no business imposing any more constraints than are needed to fulfill its purpose. REST specifies some architectural constraints that entail certain distribution and scaling properties, that's its purpose. Anything beyond that is domain-specific logic. |
Perhaps, yet his blog is written in exactly the same style.
Who are all these ComSci researchers who are most comfortable with these concepts and distinctions, anyway, and who are also designing web APIs? At some point, if you wish any real system to use your ideas, you need to communicate it in some way that explains it for a typical software developer. If you write a blog in the style of a thesis, only thesis committee members will ever want to read it, or be able to understand it.
It's like the old story of the plumber who discovered hydrochloric acid clears clogs, and when he reported it, some scientists told him "The efficacy of hydrochloric acid is indisputable, but the corrosive residue is incompatible with metallic permanence", and he thanked them. Repeat several more exchanges, with even more jargon. Finally, they tell him "Don't use hydrochloric acid. It eats hell out of the pipes."