[programminggeek]

At least the author is wise enough to see that REST/RPC are not so different from each other.

I actually find it interesting that as I was learning about earlier networked "objects" type systems, programmers ran into problems where they were treating the networked objects as if they were local and that the network always works. Now, when we build REST api's they always ship with client libraries that feel like local objects and completely abstract away most notions of network failure, etc.

I'm not saying we've made an unreasonable tradeoff, it's just interesting that we seem to be making more refined versions of the same solutions with the same fundamental problems.

I guess the author was making a similar point.

[steveklabnik]

"Layman's REST" is very much RPC, yes.

Fielding's REST is very much not.

[mantrax5]

Fielding's REST is pretty much CRUD in HTTP disguise.

Don't get me wrong, this can be great for "hypermedia applications" as Fielding's paper argues. But "hypermedia applications" just doesn't fit what many distributed services do these days.

Services are naturally centered arounds verbs (commands and queries) and not nouns (resources), so like with any other CRUD system, at some point a REST API that shoehorns everything into the four standard verbs HTTP commonly gives us, no longer adequately describes the business requirements of your app. You can definitely force things to be RESTful, but it's typically not the natural way to build an API. Feels akin to the ORM kind of impedance mismatch in some ways.

[steveklabnik]

I agree that many services are simply CRUD wrappers. That doesn't have much to do with the nature of the architecture Fielding proposes.

I would be interested in some citations from Fielding which demonstrate that RPC is its organizational principle. I don't think they're there, though.

[beamatronic]

I'm surprised someone hasn't embraced the idea and built the ultimate generic CRUD wrapper

[steveklabnik]

They often fail. See ActiveResource, for example.

[mantrax6]

Fieldman's work doesn't exist in vacuum. He talks about HTTP, and HTTP has the verbs it has. It's hard enough to find consistent behavior in HTTP servers and proxies with "PUT" and "DELETE" let alone anything else. But even ignoring that, the verbs the spec talks about are limited. And that's a big problem.

As for RPC, essentially any communication between machines is a RPC. It's message passing ("call") and if the message arrives on the other end it's processed by a message handler ("procedure").

No server can just reach into another server's RAM and get or modify a resource directly. The interaction happens entirely by the will of the message receiver, and in exactly the way the receiver wants (not the sender).

So if we'll be building everything on an appropriate abstraction, it better match what really happens (messages, message handlers) and not some wishful thinking abstraction layered on top (resources, resource modification).

RPC is not REST's problem. The problem is the limited commands (PUT, POST, DELETE) and the single possible query type (GET) that we need to work with.

When a payment gateway has to represent a simple "process payment" command with a series of bogus abstractions like a "POST /payment/transaction/new", you know REST is the wrong tool for the job.

[steveklabnik]

> He talks about HTTP, and HTTP has the verbs it has.

Sure, but REST is not HTTP. Yes, it was created to describe the architecture of HTTP, but you can do REST over other protocols, and even HTTP is not truly RESTful. Indeed, Fielding's thesis devotes an entire section to this: http://www.ics.uci.edu/~fielding/pubs/dissertation/evaluatio...

> and proxies with "PUT" and "DELETE"

This is due to the HTML spec, not anything else. In fact, this was almost changed in HTML5, but the problems with adding arbitrary verbs to HTML.FORM weren't adequately addressed. You could make that case, if you felt you'd solved the problems.

> As for RPC, essentially any communication between machines is a RPC

This characterization of RPC means that _everything_ is RPC, which means it's not a very useful way to compare architectures.

> The problem is the limited commands (PUT, POST, DELETE) and the single possible query type (GET) that we need to work with.

HTTP != REST. That said, something very similar to this is called the 'uniform interface constraint,' and is definitional to REST.

By the way, HTTP can have extension verbs too, so you're not actually limited to that.

Anyway, you still haven't shown me how Fielding's REST is RPC, or at least, in the way that software architects talk about RPC. http://www.ics.uci.edu/~fielding/pubs/dissertation/evaluatio... may be instructive.

[mantrax5]

Regarding RPC, you're right, I guess I'm not quite following the classical understanding of it. I tend to work with actor systems, where everything (in-process or intra-process) is message passing, so I tend to see the message layer first, and anything else merely a protocol implemented on top of it. Hence my response.

As for HTTP, if HTTP itself isn't truly RESTful, the only protocol I've ever seen REST implemented on, I'll have to resign from this debate, because it becomes completely abstract.

I hope the right protocol comes along to show us what REST might really be.

I'm spotting a bit of a pattern in REST supporters, where if some understanding of REST is found to have faults, it's called "not truly RESTful". Reminds me of how Agile failures tended to be explained as "not truly Agile"... but that's another story.

I judge a system by the implementations, not by the theory. If REST is this beautiful unattainable ideal that almost no one can truly implement, I tend to think the fault doesn't lie with the implementers.

It's quite likely REST simply has very few applications itself, but the applications have the potential to become all-encompassing (like the web itself). But in this case the issue remains REST is not suitable for 99% of the services people expose on-line, as each of those services has a specific scope and application, where REST's "network effects" of uniform resource interface and so on don't apply.

[ademarre]

The problem with REST is that many (I dare say most) who think they are applying it really aren't.

I think this is quite relevant: http://roy.gbiv.com/untangled/2008/rest-apis-must-be-hyperte...

What sets REST apart from RPC is the Hypermedia-as-the-Engine-of-Application-State principle (HATEOAS). With HATEOAS, interaction semantics are removed from URIs and defined in terms of link relations. This decouples clients from URIs; very valuable.

ADD: To equate REST with CRUD overlooks HATEOAS completely. Simple CRUD solutions work on resources that have already been identified, but HATEOAS adds resource identification/addressing and discovery in a very maintainable way.

[steveklabnik]

While I agree with you that that's certainly an interesting part of the split between RPC and REST, you might be curious to know that Fielding doesn't think so.

> What makes HTTP significantly different from RPC is that the requests are directed to resources using a generic interface with standard semantics that can be interpreted by intermediaries almost as well as by the machines that originate services.

http://www.ics.uci.edu/~fielding/pubs/dissertation/evaluatio...

[ademarre]

Interesting, thank you; but in that quote isn't Fielding actually comparing RPC and HTTP, not REST?

[steveklabnik]

Yes, you're right, I was being a bit sloppy there. The Uniform Interface (and Layered System) is one of the ways in which HTTP does follow RESTful principles, though, so the thrust is still the same.

[superdude264]

I don't understand how it's possible to program to a true REST service given his final bullet point and one of his comments:

> A REST API should be entered with no prior knowledge beyond the initial URI (bookmark) and set of standardized media types that are appropriate for the intended audience (i.e., expected to be understood by any client that might use the API). From that point on, all application state transitions must be driven by client selection of server-provided choices that are present in the received representations or implied by the user’s manipulation of those representations. The transitions may be determined (or limited by) the client’s knowledge of media types and resource communication mechanisms, both of which may be improved on-the-fly (e.g., code-on-demand). [Failure here implies that out-of-band information is driving interaction instead of hypertext.]

> When I say hypertext, I mean the simultaneous presentation of information and controls such that the information becomes the affordance through which the user (or automaton) obtains choices and selects actions. [...] Hypertext does not need to be HTML on a browser. Machines can follow links when they understand the data format and relationship types.

If you're only supposed to start with an initial URI and there is no out-of-band communication, how is an automaton supposed to know what links to follow to reach the desired information? A person can do this by reading, reasoning about what they read, then following the appropriate link. Writing an automaton that can reason about anything that can fall under the initial URI seems equivalent to writing some kind of artificial intelligence.

[prawks]

The key is:

> [a] set of standardized media types that are appropriate for the intended audience (i.e., expected to be understood by any client that might use the API)

There is out-of-band "communication" in that the client and server agree on these media types and how to use them.

The following article does the best job I've seen at illustrating a truly RESTful service:

http://www.infoq.com/articles/webber-rest-workflow

The <next> node in the response to the order POST is one such example.

[superdude264]

Great article. If I'm understanding it correctly, it seems like the advantage comes from mapping your domain actions to the standard HTTP actions on each domain object. Once this is done, your API is simply the media types and the interaction with your service can be done through well-understood HTTP actions rather than learning a bunch of method calls as in an RPC approach. Correct?

[pfraze]

There are common standards for links. I think you can do reasonably well by supporting 2 or 3, though I'd prefer the world moved to the Link header. The others are html (<link>, <a>) json-hal, jsonld, etc. Regarding the process:

Links include metadata and types (the "rel" attribute). You can think of the full set of given links as an index. To search this index, you scan for reltype first (since that carries semantics and guarantees behavior) then check the other metadata attrs as needed (eg type=text/css). The only knowledge you embed then is published under the reltype specs.

[bodhi]

So, honest question. I've been musing over REST and RPC for a while, and was trying to come up with some domains that were verb-oriented instead of noun-oriented. The only thing I could come up with was message passing, a-la XMPP or streaming content.

What are some other problem domains that are better represented in verb-oriented terminology?

[programminggeek]

I think when an action affects multiple nouns at the same time, it starts to look more like a verb oriented approach. For example, say you have some kind of fundraising event donation system where you can have a donor donate to people or teams of people participating at the event as well as the event itself or the organization as a whole. So, something like a 5k run to save the whales.

When you create a donation that impacts potentially an auth record and a user account (if they create one), a donation, as well a it could end up touching the event, participant, team, or organization itself. Now, do you make all those data changes as a series of nouns with actions that you must do in some particular workflow and order? Or, do you have a higher level verb that you throw input at and it returns a result, doing whatever it needs to do in the process? Or do you have a noun with a single verb that starts to feel a lot like RPC?

In some ways they are equivalent, you have input, state change, and output. In other ways they are different. I would expect in REST you might have to hit multiple nouns to change all the state appropriately and I'm not sure there is a good mechanism to enforce that it happens correctly according to the desired workflow.

In the end, for things beyond CRUD and reporting, I think complex actions that touch multiple verbs is often better represented as a verb. However, I would love to see concrete examples of how you model complex workflow based state changes as a "transaction" or workflow in REST or if REST api's inherently opt out of such behavior.

[dragonwriter]

> When you create a donation that impacts potentially an auth record and a user account (if they create one), a donation, as well a it could end up touching the event, participant, team, or organization itself. Now, do you make all those data changes as a series of nouns with actions that you must do in some particular workflow and order? Or, do you have a higher level verb that you throw input at and it returns a result, doing whatever it needs to do in the process? Or do you have a noun with a single verb that starts to feel a lot like RPC?

Well, you have a noun "donation". Whether it has multiple or single verbs depends on what operations make sense against that noun. Though it seems like that it would support multiple verbs.

There is no guarantee in REST that an operation on one resource has no effect on other resources. In fact, its quite common for operations to effect other resources.

> I would expect in REST you might have to hit multiple nouns to change all the state appropriately and I'm not sure there is a good mechanism to enforce that it happens correctly according to the desired workflow.

The method is that in this case, the "donation" resources would support appropriate verbs, and the other nouns which could not be changed independently which might be changed as a result of actions on the donation resource would not need verbs to support those changes, but would change as a result of the course of implementing the actions on the donation resource.

People seem to think of REST in terms of mapping to RDBMSs with resources as analogous records in base tables in a normalized schema against which you conduct CRUD operations. But, if you have to think of REST in RDBMS terms, its a better analogy to think of the resources exposed by an API as records in a set of potentially updatable, potentially denormalized, and potentially overlapping views rather than base tables.

[steveklabnik]

> I would expect in REST you might have to hit multiple nouns to change all the state appropriately

In layman's REST, yes. In Fielding's REST, no. It's one of the serious ways in which layman's REST is deficient.

[icedchai]

Exactly this. I've seen people doing crazy, non-nonsensical stuff to make their APIs "RESTful". So RESTful that they make no sense.

[dreamfactory2]

> Services are naturally centered arounds verbs (commands and queries) and not nouns (resources)

Can you qualify that? Queries are presumably queries on resources, and which commands did you have in mind apart from creating or updating resources?

[cfallin]

Not OP, but a thought anyway: these worldviews are sort of duals of each other, IMHO. You can consider a "noun" to be one instance of a verb's application, i.e., an action. For example, "send an email" or "purchase an item", both verbs, translate to creating new nouns representing (respectively) an email in my Outbox or a transaction. The advantage of the noun worldview is that the nouns can describe the history of verbs and the resulting application state, e.g., I can look at and manage the whole ledger of transactions, whereas verbs are just ad-hoc manipulations of that state.

[grey-area]

I think the reason people limit verbs (or nouns) usually comes down to attempting to limit the gestalt which others coming new to the system have to hold in their head - if I know that you serve n resources, each of which has 4 well understood verbs, it's much easier to reason about than if I must know the verbs which go with each object and what they do to that particular object in your world.

Of course the real world and real systems will never conform to this sort of system, and you have to break out of it occasionally, but sometimes it's a good starting point as long as you're don't let it limit the horizons of your world, such that only 4 verbs should be enough for anyone, or verbs become completely subsidiary to nouns and must be escorted by them at all times. Zealotry based on this perfectly reasonable idea (limiting complexity to promote understanding) often leads to a Kingdom of Nouns situation:

http://steve-yegge.blogspot.co.uk/2006/03/execution-in-kingd...

[scotth]

Aside: Why do you have so many accounts mantrax? At least one of them is dead, and I'm sure you can imagine why.

[scotth]

HN hellbans, so you might not realize you're not being heard.

I'm seeing [dead] markers from matrax6 and mantrax7 (although oddly enough, not consistently).

Can't comment on the quality of the code. Your problems sound atypical.

[mantrax6]

None of them are dead. As for why, long story short, because HackerNews' code is really poorly written. Gateway errors, horrendous response times, bogus limits and false positives. My usage patterns are likely not typical, but this is hardly an excuse for such a poor UX.

For example, I couldn't even respond right now through mantrax5...

Next time I'll just take the alternative and instead of making more accounts, I'll just stop visiting the site completely.

[ademarre]

Have you reported these HN bugs?