The first thing everybody using "REST" should do is completely ignore Fielding's thesis. So much internet comment time is wasted on interpreting that document.

The first thing everybody using "REST" should do is completely ignore Fielding's thesis. So much internet comment time is wasted on interpreting that document. It's overly confusing. I'm fine with the idea that URIs reference resources and HTTP actions are verbs. I also take issue with the claim that gRPC and protocol buf is brittle; the protocol was explicitly designed to allow older servers to process messages from newer clients (and vice versa) to the best of their ability. More importantly: there are enormous production servers that see waves of server updates (and their associated clients are also getting updated) sending petabytes to exabytes to each other every day; in that sense, it's clearly not brittle or far more users would have a negative experience. I just spent several weeks onboarding a new system that is based around REST and JSON schema. JSON schema... like most of the things with JSON and Javascript, feel like they were implemented in a hurry by non-experts who wanted to solve a problem, and made something simple enough that large numbers of users adopted it. Now we're stuck with the "core technology is based on less-than-awesome technology". most folks don't even use schema, and the document databases that receive the JSON blobs just sort of treat them as a dynamically created schema defined by the envelope of all extant messages (see, for example, dynamic mapping in elasticsearch). (my experience includes: XDR and SunRPC, CORBA, protocol bufs, stubby/grpc, XML, WSDL, SOAP, and many more systems. I am not authoritative, and I have my own strong opinions based on experience. But I have to say, I'd rather work in an grpc/protobuf world than a REST/JSON one. It's much more robust.