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> in my opinion this not only introduces more confusion I don't think that's possible. I've officially banned the word "REST" from being used in technical disc

• goto11 5y ago
  The problem is not REST per se, the problem is people thinking a machine-to-machine API "should" conform to REST. I have not seen a coherent argument for why HATEOAS should be a useful property for API's beside "REST says so". That said, we should not throw the baby out with the bathwater. Some REST principles like statelessness are good design for API's also.
  • pa7x1 5y ago
    100% agree, HATEOAS is rather useless for machine-to-machine. And it shouldn't come as a surprise that most APIs decide to not commit to this design constraint. I prefer to think of real-world APIs as coming in varying degees of RESTfulness depending on the design constraints they have chosen to conform to. Good engineering is about making judicious analysis of the trade-offs involved, if HATEOAS doesn't bring you anything dropping it is the right thing to do.
    • Joker_vD 5y ago
      HATEOAS is somewhat useful even in machine-to-machine: hard-coded URLs in clients are kind of a PITA to support.
      • goto11 5y ago
        What is the problem with hard-coded URLs? It is certainly simpler than having to extract the URLs from some other request. If they don't change (and they shouldn't!) I don't see the problem.
        • Joker_vD 5y ago
          Well the problem is exactly that they do change sometimes. And having only one hard-coded URL is easier than having twelve of those. > It is certainly simpler than having to extract the URLs from some other request. It's not extracted from other request, it's extracted from the response to the original request, and using a field from the local struct is not harder than using a global constant.
          • goto11 5y ago
            > Well the problem is exactly that they do change sometimes. Well they shouldn't! And if the API arbitrarily changes URLs around without reason, then surely they might also change the URL for the initial request.
            • Joker_vD 5y ago
              > Well they shouldn't! If you treat them as public interface, they shouldn't, yes. But if you treat them as internal implementation details, they absolutely could. One can also think about it as static vs dynamic dispatch: you make an initial request, you get a vtable of "method name -> method pointer" as a part of response. Or you can hardcode the method pointers and make it the remote server's job to properly chose the appropriate internal endpoint.
              • goto11 5y ago
                But what is the point? Why introduce an extra layer of complexity to mitigate changing URL's, something which has no purpose in the first place?
                • slver 5y ago
                  Bingo
              • deleted 5y ago
                [deleted]
          • 5y ago
      • slver 5y ago
        To be fair, you need at least one hard-coded URL in your client, don't you? To hit the root entrypoint. And if you have one hard-coded URL... and use it as the root of other URLs, then it's no hard to support than anything. URLs are useful in REST because the API often crosses domain boundaries and company boundaries. One site links to another and so on. Most APIs are not like that. In fact they're only like that when they serve, say, static image assets off a CDN, and guess what, then passing back a URL in your API is self-evident and natural. But not for everything IMHO.
        • unscaled 5y ago
          If you look at the hydra API example[1] linked by OP, this is exactly what it needs: one entrypoint URL. If your API only needs a single domain name (as over 99% of the APIs are), clients can just have the base URL encoded in a constant or a configuration file. What HATEOAS ostensibly gives you is not the ability to painlessly switch domains, but rather to change your entire URL path structure and even the entire schema represented by your REST endpoints. This feature turns out to be quite useless for most REST clients. Cosmetic changes to URL structure aside, any useful change (in other words - a schema change), will break the client logic, which is still hard-coded to deal with a predefined schema, predefined types of resources and a predefined set of actions that can be performed on each of them. Roy Fielding accurately notes that a truly "RESTful" app should let the engine of its state be completely driven by the server. In other words the client cannot have any _specific_ logic related to "state transfers". If your client is not doing this, like a browser does, than what does it have left to gain from implementing HATEOAS? I'm honestly interested in hearing good arguments, since I haven't heard anything that managed to convince me yet. I've always worked all my API up to level 2 (HTTP Verbs) of the Richardson Maturity model, but I've never felt convinced that HATEOAS is worth the effort. It seems like the majority of HTTP API designers out there have the same opinion. [1]: https://generic.hypermedia.app/ https://generic.hypermedia.app/
          • slver 5y ago
            > What HATEOAS ostensibly gives you is not the ability to painlessly switch domains, but rather to change your entire URL path structure and even the entire schema represented by your REST endpoints. Which would be utterly pointless, because the fact this schema is opaque to the clients means that it's meaningless to the clients. So you have no reason to change it. > I've always worked all my API up to level 2 (HTTP Verbs) of the Richardson Maturity model, but I've never felt convinced that HATEOAS is worth the effort. It seems like the majority of HTTP API designers out there have the same opinion. The "maturity model" is honestly non-sense and Fielding also thinks that. It's kinda like first level to being a bird is flapping your hands, second step is whistling with your mouth... No, you're not any closer to being a bird, you need to be the entire thing for the benefits of being a bird to come about. Trying to stick to the CRUD concept of HTTP verbs is rather harmful. CRUD is a common starting point for a domain's verb structure, but being restricted to it is crippling and results in bizarre obscure semantics or underdeveloped business constraints. I'd say to hell with all of it. I stick to HTTP as-is, and that's it. Also it's telling I think that to this day HTML forms only support GET and POST. Even HTML isn't RESTful I guess. /s
    • einrealist 5y ago
      I disagree. Even if an API is effectively used by a machine, the root cause either is human interaction or it makes sense to also allow human interaction (e.g. for testing, troubleshooting, interactive documentation). HATEOAS can help to define formats that solve both problems.
      • slver 5y ago
        You can define formats without HATEOAS.
        • dragonwriter 5y ago
          Obviously, since defining formats and driving logic through defined and identified-in-band formats is an element but not the whole of HATEOAS. OTOH, applications using pseudo-REST without HATEOAS typically hardcode both URLs and formats rather than relying on in-band identification of both.
    • hangonhn 5y ago
      HATEOAS was a little more useful when the commonly used media was XML rather than JSON. XML has XPath, which I was able to use to find the URLs for the different actions I want to perform, should they ever change. In practice, however, those URLs never changed or were constructed in a very predictable way.
  • slver 5y ago
    You're entirely right. Another problem with REST is that Fielding himself describes it as a "large grain resource approach". It's no surprise we love HTTP and URLs when we have to return, say, images, downloads or entire documents in our APIs. Just put the URL in, serve it on your CDN. But for small grain data items, it's terrible.
  • dragonwriter 5y ago
    > I have not seen a coherent argument for why HATEOAS should be a useful property for API's beside "REST says so". Loose coupling and extensibility, the same reason that its used on the web, which is quite critically a machine-to-machine protocol (while obviously humans consume it via user-agents, automatic crawling and othee machine-to-machine processing is key to the success of the web) and HATEOAS is key to why it works.
• EMM_386 5y ago
  > I don't think that's possible. I've officially banned the word "REST" from being used in technical discussions. I've been a software engineer for decades and I am helping a company move from SOAP-based XML services into a more coherent REST-type architecture. Why would this be a banned technical discussion?
  • deaddodo 5y ago
    I think their point is that REST means nothing beyond “uses HTTP verbs” these days. Most companies/teams can’t even agree on the differences between POST, PUT and PATCH; let alone status codes, payload structure, authentication, etc. So using the term REST will mean something different to every person using it. Similar to how a Ruby, PHP and Python engineer will envision a different architecture if you tell them to build a “backend”.
    • slver 5y ago
      > I think their point is that REST means nothing beyond “uses HTTP verbs” Funny thing is that this means HTML pages also aren't restful, because they stick to GET and POST.
      • deaddodo 5y ago
        HTML (/browsers) have agreed upon payloads, status codes and authentication. The lack of PUT/DELETE/etc is more a function of use cases than the HTTP/HTML standard and there are plenty of example servers that are fully RESTful. That was also the original use case of web browsers (as a document-store/multimedia+hyperlink-enhanced FTP).
    • bewo001 5y ago
      They call REST anything that uses JSON over HTTP nowadays. What I don't get, when they don't know or don't want to do REST, why they are not just calling their API JSON/HTTP?
      • mixmastamyk 5y ago
• dragonwriter 5y ago
  > I've officially banned the word "REST" from being used in technical discussions. So if I want to refer to the architecture of that name described in Fielding’s Architectural Styles and the Design of Network-based Software Architectures, what is the approved circumlocution?
  • Kinrany 5y ago
    I assume they mean REST as applied to APIs. The thesis is just not about APIs, as argued by the article.