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REST is freedom (with all its downsides when you can do what you want), SOAP is like military (with all its strong rules). It's like comparing a micro web fram

REST is freedom (with all its downsides when you can do what you want), SOAP is like military (with all its strong rules). It's like comparing a micro web framework with a full web framework. I think it always depends what you want to do in which scale with REST. What's great for a single hobby developer would be bad for a big world wide corporation. If you really want more rules, more restrictions and more boundaries for 100 of developers working on your project you should definitely look on something build on top of it (graphql, odata) or one of the replacement architectures like grpc if you have high demands in your infrastructure. For me as a developer I'm always happy when things are not overcomplicated at the beginning, but some developers like more structure down the road. At the end you need to get stuff done and I think it's better to educate yourself about REST in general than some big other framework which you need to implement somehow everywhere.

fapjacks 9y ago
This is really tangential, sorry, but I'd like to mention that the (US) military is strongly opinionated in a relatively small number of ways. Additionally, the rules are self-enforced throughout most of its structure, and almost none of the rules being broken will cause the system or its components to fail. The US military is actually incredibly flexible, because the (mostly) self-enforced strong opinions inform the decisions of subsets of the military all the way down to the individual level, allowing each component to be effective almost regardless of the health of the rest of the system. SOAP was incredibly inflexible. I think perhaps a better analogy would be to compare SOAP to some defense contractors, where things must work a certain way, or they grind to a halt and become very expensive to debug and triage. Also, incidentally, I'm interested to hear about your experiences with gRPC. I have just played with it, but it sounds like you had some issues scaling with it? Or didn't like it so much? I much prefer REST because of its inherent flexibility, as you do, but I am interested to hear from people who scaled with gRPC.

fapjacks 9y ago

This is really tangential, sorry, but I'd like to mention that the (US) military is strongly opinionated in a relatively small number of ways. Additionally, the rules are self-enforced throughout most of its structure, and almost none of the rules being broken will cause the system or its components to fail. The US military is actually incredibly flexible, because the (mostly) self-enforced strong opinions inform the decisions of subsets of the military all the way down to the individual level, allowing each component to be effective almost regardless of the health of the rest of the system. SOAP was incredibly inflexible. I think perhaps a better analogy would be to compare SOAP to some defense contractors, where things must work a certain way, or they grind to a halt and become very expensive to debug and triage. Also, incidentally, I'm interested to hear about your experiences with gRPC. I have just played with it, but it sounds like you had some issues scaling with it? Or didn't like it so much? I much prefer REST because of its inherent flexibility, as you do, but I am interested to hear from people who scaled with gRPC.