How Did REST Come To Mean The Opposite of REST? | htmx
How Did REST Come To Mean The Opposite of REST? | htmx
htmx gives you access to AJAX, CSS Transitions, WebSockets and Server Sent Events directly in HTML, using attributes, so you can build modern user interfaces with the simplicity and power of hypertext htmx is small (~14k min.gz’d), dependency-free, extendable, IE11 compatible & has reduced code...
This is sorta funny for me because as a non cs major who went into it it seems like all the api's I work with are called rest apis and I was always wondering what a non rest api would be.
SOAP, which is basically dead, or GraphQL.
see. now I have seen references to soap but never really got that to. when it comes down to it my biggest concern is things just work.
This is all very “old man yells at cloud”.
Interesting historical note, but things change.
I'd Agree in most cases, but not in this one.
Rigor in definitions allows us to express a lot of complex things in a compact form. this allows us to treat "Cars" as something different than "Motorcycles" while both a motorized vehicles.
the same is true for REST-API and other API-Types, while all of them are just a means to allow services to exchange data, they tell us a lot about how this exchange happens and what to expect, but only if we use the words in a way that they represent the concept they were meant to represent. Otherwise we end up with meaningless buzz words like "rest", "agile", "scrum", "artificial intelligence" and so forth, instead of meaningful terms found in the jargon of other engineering disciplines like "magnetism", "gravity" or "motor".
Rigor in definitions allows us to express a lot of complex things in a compact form. this allows us to treat "Cars" as something different than "Motorcycles" while both a motorized vehicles.
Meh. There's plenty of room in the gray zone between "car" and "motorcycle" where things like this or this can exist. The botanical world has worked very hard to create rigorous definitions of fruits and vegetables only to be completely ignored by cooks. The culinary world in general has done just fine for centuries without rigorously specifying whether taco's are sandwiches and cereal is a soup.
As long as it is generally understood what people mean by a word when they use it everything will be mostly fine. REST is an understood term, whether the inventor of the term meant something else by it is immaterial.
A cargo cult doesn’t change airplanes by building mock runways - they rather miss the point entirely.
Honestly this is completely ridiculous. Hypertext using HTML constraints is absolutely insufficient for representing application state. It's the wrong tool for the job and always has been, because it conflates document structure with semantic meaning.
Said another way, HTML cannot be relied on to capture a representation of application state.
The reason REST doesn't use HTML in most contexts is because applications don't use HTML in most contexts anymore.
Demanding that application representation use a specific encoding strategy is ridiculous and misses the point entirely, which is that HTTP is no longer the right protocol for the job.
While HTML is hypertext markup language, hypertext is not HTML.
Hypertext doesn’t imply a specific encoding strategy, it implies semantics - data contains links to related data. If you want to encode it in protobufs - you do you, REST explicitly calls for freedom in this regard.
To paraphrase yourself, ranting about HTML as if it was a requirement for REST is ridiculous and misses the point entirely.
PS: HTML is not a protocol.
They're not demanding anything. They're describing how the current meaning of REST is nothing like the original one.
They're making a point for not splitting application state and logic into client and server with shared knowledge. If you're making that a pretext of course their argumentation won't fit. They're describing an alternative architecture and approach. Not an alternative protocol for the current common web application architectures.