What it means for an API to be RESTful

Many years ago as a young developer I read Fielding's dissertation, Fowler's writings on the Richardson Maturity Model and even a book (don't remember the title) on the topic. Then I spent the next dozen years creating, reading, updating and deleting JSON APIs.

Problem Details (RFC 9457) are useful and have made an occasional appearance, but actual hypermedia driven APIs with custom media types seem to be non-existent outside of example blog posts. It's much more common to instead see APIs overload lesser-used HTTP status codes with their own domain-specific meanings. But if I'm being honest, this sort of protocol crime almost never caused an actual problem in practice.

The advocacy for "true REST" is missing a compelling argument and useful example of why it would actually be an improvement. Despite its prominence, for over 20 years almost nobody has used this approach. Why is that?

I do still have an aesthetic appreciation for "true REST", but in practice I find the fact that nobody uses it to be mainly useful in ending bikeshedding discussions. Once you understand your API isn't RESTful to begin with, there's no longer any point in arguing if 411 or 412 is the more RESTful status code to use when a user attempts to order a product without specifying a quantity. (Spoiler: neither is correct) You simply send a 400 with Problem Details and call it a day. Ironically, this indifference may make your API just a little bit more RESTful.

REST seems to bring out people who like to define specs and correct others on following the spec or not. There are many other things in tech like this.

To be honest, I just kind of don't understand the point. Could my API be better following some of these rules the author presented? Probably. But by how much? Is it worth it? When someone else on my team disagrees do we go back and argue about the spec again?

After 12+ years I'm just not sure anymore. If I'm using REST incorrectly (according to this article or others), but getting good results and everyone on the team is aligned, does it matter? I'm willing to have my mind changed this, maybe I'm missing something important

Isn't this well defined already? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/REST

> REST (Representational State Transfer) is a software architectural style that was created to describe the design and guide the development of the architecture for the World Wide Web. REST defines a set of constraints for how the architecture of a distributed, Internet-scale hypermedia system, such as the Web, should behave.

And isn't it always misused, mis-represented basically all the time? Often confused with things that are basically just JSON API(s)?

Well, this inevitable flamewar will be a nice change from the pro-AI / anti-AI comment threads, at least...

Here is how REST came to mean the opposite of REST:

https://htmx.org/essays/how-did-rest-come-to-mean-the-opposi...

And here is why REST is probably largely pointless in machine-to-machine APIs:

https://intercoolerjs.org/2016/05/08/hatoeas-is-for-humans.h...

GET /api/add-a-comment?message=disagree

whole thing about RESTful api - majority of people never understood it - few people like the htmx crowd tried to bring it up again to teach people the right way.

but people who didn't understand rest some of them migrated to graphql or rpc.

> They usually live under the _links parent.

The example given in this section... is there actually a commonly used REST api that uses that particular key/structure? I wouldn't be _surprised_ if I came across that in some random API's documentation, but I hardly think it's the 'usual' thing to do.

The article later claims that that style is from https://stateless.co/hal_specification.html , which I think is a consultancy company whose major partners are all casinos (am I totally off on this?). The article also references (https://github.com/kevinswiber/siren which adds detail re: http methods embedded in the _links structure, but I'm not sure why that repo should be considered authoritative. 1300 stars for a just a spec is actually not bad though I think, so maybe.

Overall this article seems like slop produces from some kind of ai crawler that managed to dig up a couple of random links.

I am glad that it mentions rfc9457 though.

Any descriptive term where people can't agree on what it means is completely useless. So there's no point trying to argue "REST means this" - the fact that so many people have done that already makes it pointless.

The most bulletproof way to get a bunch of people on the internet to read your stuff is to tell them they're all wrong, never fails.

One thing missing from the hypermedia section: links do not have to live in the payload. RFC 8288 lets you carry the same relations in a Link header, and for some clients that is the only place they look. I advertise a markdown twin of a page as Link: </llms.txt>; rel="describedby"; type="text/markdown" for exactly that reason, no body parsing needed.

Conditional requests feel like the other omission. ETag and 304 are part of the same "use HTTP as intended" argument, and they change client behaviour more often than whether someone hardcoded a route.

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