[programminggeek]

I think shipping your own client lib sort of defeats the whole point of REST as the "one true way" to build API's. I agree that building a client library is useful and makes it easier to integrate with, but it also proves that REST on its own is not completely superior than something as conceptually simple as JSON-RPC.

I fully understand the benefits of REST, but on a lot of projects, a single endpoint and a simple RPC protocol would be easier to integrate without need for a separate client library.

Also, client libraries don't always do the best job of making it clear when you are making api calls over the wire and that can be quite problematic.

For example, I've worked with code where it made an http request to get a price, which was then used in a Model calculation. This code looked completely harmless at the highest level, but each page request was hitting the server 100+ times to do all the calculations needed.

After finding the problem adding some caching was easy and now things run faster. However, having that level of abstraction and indirection makes it far less obvious if/when/where HTTP requests happen and that isn't always a good thing.