I hate when people try tell me REST isnt the way to go. I guess if you're an out-dated organization with a lot of time (and money) on your hands, you could stuff around with something else...but why would you in this world as a startup do anything else?
Nice article, i think the world needs a very basic "this is how you use REST" bullet point style blog post somewhere. This lesson would be 1 of those bullet points if i were writing it.
Have you actually ever been a consumer of an extensive, pure REST API? At the point in time in which you are required to make a couple hundred requests in a single page in order to build something useful you'll start to wonder why it's touted so much.
Unless, of course, the company maintaining the API has the resources to have almost all requests cached and a responsible data design to facilitate accurate ETAG matching. If not... well you are going to be at the whim of their server architecture.
Even then, that's an incredible amount of calls to make just to display some information.
>why would you in this world as a startup do anything else?
Because the tech's immature and irrelevant to your core competency? The paragraph at the end of the HATEOAS page sums it up pretty well for me - and seems to be struggling to make the case for the benefits of "full REST". I despise the enterprisey verbosity of SOAP et al, but given the choice between an inefficient but well understood standard with good tooling support and the new hotness that no-one quite understands properly yet...
Yeah i guess you're right, i too get quiet frustrated by how verbose SOAP is and that's the true reason as to why i've personally avoided.
Having worked fairly extensively with the Facebook API in recent years i've just come used to dealing with REST API's (and honestly while they do a half decent job, it has a lot of shortcomings)
I just find the time to get a REST API up and running is very short, and for that reason it tends to be my choice. Not saying its the right one however :P
Nice article, i think the world needs a very basic "this is how you use REST" bullet point style blog post somewhere. This lesson would be 1 of those bullet points if i were writing it.