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Thrift and protobufs are underappreciated. Better integration in something similar to the Swagger Editor would give these a much more comfortable home and allow

Thrift and protobufs are underappreciated. Better integration in something similar to the Swagger Editor would give these a much more comfortable home and allow them to see adoption in the web world, where people generally expect things to be a little softer. I've never really liked the REST paradigm, so I'd be pleased to see it die. My biggest complaint with Thrift: they still make you do some convoluted hacks to get a two-way ("streaming") connection in the RPC, and when this is discussed, they usually kibosh it pretty quickly by saying it's an unsupported case and that you can find some hacks online, but they don't want to talk about it any further. This may not have been a big problem for them before gRPC was released for protobufs, but it's definitely something that's worthy of attention and response now. I know lots of people who are going with protobufs instead because of this. The other thing is that while Thrift boasts a lot of language compatibility, several of these are buggy.

jessaustin 10y ago
I've never really liked the REST paradigm, so I'd be pleased to see it die. Don't hold your breath. Fielding's thesis is already 17 years old, so one would expect its philosophy to endure by the Lindy Effect if for no other reason.
- cookiecaper 10y ago
  If the "Lindy Effect" was a natural law and not simply a shorthand to refer to enduring popularity, nothing would ever die out; its lifetime would continually double. Wikipedia notes this: Because life expectancy is probabilistically derived, a thing may become extinct before its "expected" survival. In other words, one needs to gauge both the age and "health" of the thing to determine continued survival. There are lots of things in tech that we just stop doing one day. They get replaced by a different hot new thing. I'm sure REST will not go extinct for a very long time, but it definitely could go cold, just like its popular predecessors.
  - emmelaich 10y ago
    Perhaps REST as the thing you do over http with http verbs won't be around. But the architectural principle called REST will be around forever because it's essentially the same thing as functional programming. That REST is cache friendly corresponds exactly to the way that pure functions are memo-ising friendly.

jessaustin 10y ago

I've never really liked the REST paradigm, so I'd be pleased to see it die. Don't hold your breath. Fielding's thesis is already 17 years old, so one would expect its philosophy to endure by the Lindy Effect if for no other reason.

cookiecaper 10y ago
If the "Lindy Effect" was a natural law and not simply a shorthand to refer to enduring popularity, nothing would ever die out; its lifetime would continually double. Wikipedia notes this: Because life expectancy is probabilistically derived, a thing may become extinct before its "expected" survival. In other words, one needs to gauge both the age and "health" of the thing to determine continued survival. There are lots of things in tech that we just stop doing one day. They get replaced by a different hot new thing. I'm sure REST will not go extinct for a very long time, but it definitely could go cold, just like its popular predecessors.
- emmelaich 10y ago
  Perhaps REST as the thing you do over http with http verbs won't be around. But the architectural principle called REST will be around forever because it's essentially the same thing as functional programming. That REST is cache friendly corresponds exactly to the way that pure functions are memo-ising friendly.