[bborud]

I tend to prefer RESTish rather than RESTful since RESTful almost suggests attempting to implement Fielding's ideas but not quite getting there. I think the subset of approaches that try and fail to implement Fielding's ideas is an order of magnitude (or two) smaller than those who go for something that is superficially similar, but has nothing to do with HATEOAS :-).

REST is an interesting idea, but I don't think it is a practical idea. It is too hard to design tools and libraries that helps/encourages/forces the user implement HATEOAS sensibly, easily and consistently.

[mandevil]

While it is amazing for initial discovery to have everything presented for the developer's inspection, in production it ends up requiring too many network round-trips to actually traverse from root to /resource_name/resource_id/sub_resource_name/sub_resource_id, or an already verbose transaction (everything is serialized and deserialized into strings!) becomes gigantic if you if don't make it hierarchical and just drop every URL into the root response.

This is why everyone just builds magic URL endpoints, and hopefully also includes a OpenAPI/Swagger documentation for them so the developer can figure it out. And then keeps the documentation up-to-date as they add new sub_resource endpoints!

[bborud]

If you are talking about REST here, expect an angry mob outside your door soon. URIs that have inherent structure and meaning? Burn the heretic! :-)