[rendall]

Unfortunately, Fielding's dissertation itself alone gives inadequate guidance to construct or even fully identify a REST API, and so a over the subsequent years a mishmash of sometimes contradictory blog posts, discussion forums, militancy, angry flame wars, and books fleshed out the REST.

The 2007 book RESTful Web Services was wildly influential in popularizing the standard by clarifying and presenting a set of further guidelines or constraints that it called Resource-Oriented Architecture.

[LegionMammal978]

As far as I can tell, he's not even describing an "API" as we'd normally use the term today. For all practical purposes, it's pretty much just "using an HTTP server and hyperlinks to let (human) users discover and interact with resources". (Or replace "HTTP" with another protocol like it in all but name.) If it has any structure past that, then it's not REST in his sense.

Personally, I think "API" is an unclear term for that kind of structure. The only actual interfacing is the HTTP protocol between the server and web browser. But the browser traditionally only acts as a proxy for the user, who is the one being served access to the resources.

[whstl]

> As far as I can tell, he's not even describing an "API" as we'd normally use the term today. For all practical purposes, it's pretty much just "using an HTTP server and hyperlinks to let (human) users discover and interact with resources".

Bingo.

Like Monads, it mostly later interpretations missing the mark.

[maleldil]

How does this relate to monads? They have a proper definition of the signatures required and the laws they must obey.

[whstl]

I said “Later interpretations of Monads”, I did not say “monads”.

Fielding’s dissertation is fine in itself. The web itself, AtomPub, OData, among others, all follow REST and HATEOAS.

Same for Monads: the laws are fine and the implementation in Haskell is fine, but meme tutorials and later implementations miss the mark.