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REST is not a scam, it's THE term for the underlying architectural style of the web. Your straw-man interpretation is a scam. The crappy silverlight app is ba

REST is not a scam, it's THE term for the underlying architectural style of the web. Your straw-man interpretation is a scam. The crappy silverlight app is badly designed and the performance issues you were seeing can be optimised away trivially. (create a new composite resource which can represent the entire tree in one go). That is nothing to do with REST. "the #1 delusion in distributed systems is that you can compose distributed operations the same way you compose function calls in a normal program" - This is exactly what REST addresses as a style.. i.e. REST is not RPC. Latency is another issue which REST addresses directly. This is why caching is an explicit constraint. I have no idea what your point is re: security, sorry. Modelling state transitions is not that difficult, many languages have existing tools to help you do this.

vyrotek 15y ago
(create a new composite resource which can represent the entire tree in one go) This is the problem I face with REST all the time. I have yet to see someone pull this off gracefully. Take the hierarchy Authors/Books/Characters. If I wanted the full list of all Authors, with all Books, with all Characters what are you suggesting I do? Now what if there was another level after that? And after that? This simple example could work with the use of a 'depth' value which has been suggested. But it doesn't work all the time. Especially when there are forks in the hierarchy and you want to go deeper in one and not the other. Basically I've determined that it seems impossible to have a pure 'model' of your data and an efficient API.
- klochner 15y ago
  Take the hierarchy Authors/Books/Characters. If I wanted the full list of all Authors, with all Books, with all Characters what are you suggesting I do? The service could have a /characters resource, which returns a list of all characters, along with the author/book.
  - arethuza 15y ago
    Or the top level document looks something like (in JSON): { "characters": "<uri>", ... } Doing a GET on the supplied characters URI gets you a list of characters, each with a mixture of relevant properties and a URI for the character itself so you can interact with it directly.
- silverlake 15y ago
  odata is one solution, I think.
tptacek 15y ago
People say stuff like "[REST is] THE term for the underlying architectural style of the web", but that assertion is pretty much back-rationalized onto the web. I know I'm not the only HN'er who was there at the beginning for HTTP, and this conceptual purity that RESTians allude to just wasn't there. For as long as there has been a web, there has been at least one (often more than one) conceptual ideal claimed to be the heart of the World Wide Web. The reality is that the whole system is hacked together. Things that work well tend to be discovered, re-discovered, and perpetuated --- but that doesn't make any of them the web's "underlying architectural style". I tend to buy the idea that REST-ish-ness makes for better, clearer, more usable APIs than RPC. But I also think REST needs to win on the merits, not by waving some imaginary "REST is the web" flag.
- AffableSpatula 15y ago
  are you saying you are not convinced that the dissertation holds water? afaict, REST is (right now) the undisputed way to interpret the web's architecture.
  - tptacek 15y ago
    I'm saying what I said in my comment. Do you disagree with any of it? I might be wrong, so a specific disagreement would be interesting. An appeal to authority: less so.
    - AffableSpatula 15y ago
      honestly, I'm not sure what you were trying to say. Yes it is a post-rational analysis of the web.. yes the web was not 'designed' - it evolved.. but do I think, because it evolved, that means it doesn't/can't have an underlying architectural style? no I don't. Do I think Fielding's analysis is sound? yep - and so do most others who have read it (which is a lot of people). There is a big missing part of the dissertation though - it doesn't go into much detail about hypertext. Apparently Fielding had intended to include it but just ran out of time.
      - 15y ago
PaulHoule 15y ago
(1) The "composite resource" which initializes the application is bound specifically to the application. This codesign greatly simplifies the implementation of an application that uses async comm (Javascript, GWT, Silverlight, etc.) because you'll never get communications choreography right unless you stick to the "one user action -> one request -> update UI" paradigm. (2) Cacheing is part of the problem as much as it is part of the solution in making reliable apps. Anyone who's actually written AJAX apps knows that you frequently need to use tricks to disable cacehing to get things working right. (3) As for security, this isn't just state transitions in the Turing sense but could involve numberic ranges and other kinds of variables. Generally code that compares composite objects is the kind of code that hides errors, particularly given the fact that for most languages there is something funky about the equals operator. (This is certainly true about C++, Java and PHP)

vyrotek 15y ago

(create a new composite resource which can represent the entire tree in one go) This is the problem I face with REST all the time. I have yet to see someone pull this off gracefully. Take the hierarchy Authors/Books/Characters. If I wanted the full list of all Authors, with all Books, with all Characters what are you suggesting I do? Now what if there was another level after that? And after that? This simple example could work with the use of a 'depth' value which has been suggested. But it doesn't work all the time. Especially when there are forks in the hierarchy and you want to go deeper in one and not the other. Basically I've determined that it seems impossible to have a pure 'model' of your data and an efficient API.

klochner 15y ago
Take the hierarchy Authors/Books/Characters. If I wanted the full list of all Authors, with all Books, with all Characters what are you suggesting I do? The service could have a /characters resource, which returns a list of all characters, along with the author/book.
- arethuza 15y ago
  Or the top level document looks something like (in JSON): { "characters": "<uri>", ... } Doing a GET on the supplied characters URI gets you a list of characters, each with a mixture of relevant properties and a URI for the character itself so you can interact with it directly.
silverlake 15y ago
odata is one solution, I think.

tptacek 15y ago

People say stuff like "[REST is] THE term for the underlying architectural style of the web", but that assertion is pretty much back-rationalized onto the web. I know I'm not the only HN'er who was there at the beginning for HTTP, and this conceptual purity that RESTians allude to just wasn't there. For as long as there has been a web, there has been at least one (often more than one) conceptual ideal claimed to be the heart of the World Wide Web. The reality is that the whole system is hacked together. Things that work well tend to be discovered, re-discovered, and perpetuated --- but that doesn't make any of them the web's "underlying architectural style". I tend to buy the idea that REST-ish-ness makes for better, clearer, more usable APIs than RPC. But I also think REST needs to win on the merits, not by waving some imaginary "REST is the web" flag.

AffableSpatula 15y ago
are you saying you are not convinced that the dissertation holds water? afaict, REST is (right now) the undisputed way to interpret the web's architecture.
- tptacek 15y ago
  I'm saying what I said in my comment. Do you disagree with any of it? I might be wrong, so a specific disagreement would be interesting. An appeal to authority: less so.
  - AffableSpatula 15y ago
    honestly, I'm not sure what you were trying to say. Yes it is a post-rational analysis of the web.. yes the web was not 'designed' - it evolved.. but do I think, because it evolved, that means it doesn't/can't have an underlying architectural style? no I don't. Do I think Fielding's analysis is sound? yep - and so do most others who have read it (which is a lot of people). There is a big missing part of the dissertation though - it doesn't go into much detail about hypertext. Apparently Fielding had intended to include it but just ran out of time.
    - 15y ago

PaulHoule 15y ago

(1) The "composite resource" which initializes the application is bound specifically to the application. This codesign greatly simplifies the implementation of an application that uses async comm (Javascript, GWT, Silverlight, etc.) because you'll never get communications choreography right unless you stick to the "one user action -> one request -> update UI" paradigm. (2) Cacheing is part of the problem as much as it is part of the solution in making reliable apps. Anyone who's actually written AJAX apps knows that you frequently need to use tricks to disable cacehing to get things working right. (3) As for security, this isn't just state transitions in the Turing sense but could involve numberic ranges and other kinds of variables. Generally code that compares composite objects is the kind of code that hides errors, particularly given the fact that for most languages there is something funky about the equals operator. (This is certainly true about C++, Java and PHP)