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by marcosdumay 1256 days ago
Nobody ever understood what REST means. The "standard" creator choosing not to document its meaning really didn't help.

So, yeah, REST means whatever people use it for, that is 'HTTP services with JSON payload'. That's the actually valuable part of it anyway, the meaning that was documented after everybody started using it wrong is a synonym for the web, and we already have a name for it.
1 comments
JimDabell 1256 days ago
> The "standard" creator choosing not to document its meaning really didn't help.

REST isn’t a standard, it’s an architectural style. And I’m not sure how you can say that the author chose not to document its meaning when the name “REST” originated with the author’s PhD dissertation.

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hbrn 1256 days ago
Fielding's dissertation was about WWW. It turns out that 20+ years later, there's a new portion of WWW (web APIs) where hypermedia is not that useful.

One big difference is that WWW clients are browsers, which you don't develop yourself. API clients are typically developed by the same team that builds the API.

Losing interoperability is detrimental for WWW (browser wars), but turns out when you are the consumer of your own API, interoperability is not important at all.

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