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Actually, what the blog author is talking about is a resource-oriented architecture (ROA), which is typically implemented in a RESTful fashion over HTTP but has

Actually, what the blog author is talking about is a resource-oriented architecture (ROA), which is typically implemented in a RESTful fashion over HTTP but has recently been conflated with REST itself. ROA != REST.

strmpnk 16y ago
Exactly. ReST as a concept is not even tied to HTTP. HTTP's design was just heavily influenced my ReST so it happens to be good at it. Somehow people are obsessed over URL formatting and HTTP specificities... while they are important, it's not the literal embodiment of what representation state transfer is, just an implementation of it. What most people talk about when they say REST are good HTTP practices. Meaningful URLs, proper methods, etc... are all about using HTTP properly. We can call some of these views other acronyms like ROA but it's really just appreciation for proper and modern HTTP stacks.
- masklinn 16y ago
  > HTTP's design was just heavily influenced my ReST so it happens to be good at it. REST was extracted from HTTP. It's not that HTTP was influenced by REST, it's the exact opposite, REST is a formalization of HTTP.
  - strmpnk 16y ago
    Actually, that's not true. ReST was developed in parallel with HTTP 1.1. It used the basics from HTTP 1.0 to express some of the new ideas. You can read about the original idea in Fielding's disertation here: http://www.ics.uci.edu/~fielding/pubs/dissertation/rest_arch_style.htm http://www.ics.uci.edu/~fielding/pubs/dissertation/rest_arch... If it were an extraction of anything, it wouldn't have been HTTP but existing ideas in scaling web architectures in general at the time.
edw 16y ago
Thank you for calling a spade a spade! The author talks about REST being object-oriented when it is actually resource-oriented. I know I'm flirting with pedantry for getting worked up about this, but anyone who knows what "object-oriented" actually means is either lying or ignorant of the manifold meanings associated with that term.
shubber 16y ago
Just to amplify: there's more than a pedantic difference beteen the two. REST has a lot of serious advantages related not only to application architecture and interoperability but also to system architecture and scalability. There's a lot in the original REST dissertation about removing shared state and enabling cacheability. The crowd that mistakes ROA for REST (I think) sees the stuff in REST that relates directly to development and gets excited - but the stuff related to making their app scale, they ignore. If you don't want to learn a little bit about everything, at least follow the rules that relate to the things you don't know about.
- KevBurnsJr 16y ago
  "we'll make the URLs pretty, but we'll ignore the stuff about statelessness."

strmpnk 16y ago

Exactly. ReST as a concept is not even tied to HTTP. HTTP's design was just heavily influenced my ReST so it happens to be good at it. Somehow people are obsessed over URL formatting and HTTP specificities... while they are important, it's not the literal embodiment of what representation state transfer is, just an implementation of it. What most people talk about when they say REST are good HTTP practices. Meaningful URLs, proper methods, etc... are all about using HTTP properly. We can call some of these views other acronyms like ROA but it's really just appreciation for proper and modern HTTP stacks.

masklinn 16y ago
> HTTP's design was just heavily influenced my ReST so it happens to be good at it. REST was extracted from HTTP. It's not that HTTP was influenced by REST, it's the exact opposite, REST is a formalization of HTTP.
- strmpnk 16y ago
  Actually, that's not true. ReST was developed in parallel with HTTP 1.1. It used the basics from HTTP 1.0 to express some of the new ideas. You can read about the original idea in Fielding's disertation here: http://www.ics.uci.edu/~fielding/pubs/dissertation/rest_arch_style.htm http://www.ics.uci.edu/~fielding/pubs/dissertation/rest_arch... If it were an extraction of anything, it wouldn't have been HTTP but existing ideas in scaling web architectures in general at the time.

edw 16y ago

Thank you for calling a spade a spade! The author talks about REST being object-oriented when it is actually resource-oriented. I know I'm flirting with pedantry for getting worked up about this, but anyone who knows what "object-oriented" actually means is either lying or ignorant of the manifold meanings associated with that term.

shubber 16y ago

Just to amplify: there's more than a pedantic difference beteen the two. REST has a lot of serious advantages related not only to application architecture and interoperability but also to system architecture and scalability. There's a lot in the original REST dissertation about removing shared state and enabling cacheability. The crowd that mistakes ROA for REST (I think) sees the stuff in REST that relates directly to development and gets excited - but the stuff related to making their app scale, they ignore. If you don't want to learn a little bit about everything, at least follow the rules that relate to the things you don't know about.

KevBurnsJr 16y ago
"we'll make the URLs pretty, but we'll ignore the stuff about statelessness."