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Comment by wstrange | Hacker News Reader

Practically speaking, most REST based servers and clients are tightly coupled anyways.

That is why SDKs are so popular with developers. They just want to call a method and not be concerned with how the bits get across the wire.

And please do not cite the browser as a good example of a REST client. The browser is driven by an advanced AI (namely a human). We are not there yet with machine to machine interactions, and it isn't clear that REST is the magic bullet that will enable this kind of system.

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A good rule of thumb is that if a REST API has an SDK, then it's not really RESTful in the first place.

SDKs are an enormous effort to create and maintain for every HTTP API, I think it's a malpractice that is all too common.

Browsers (and by extension, websites) are not good examples of REST in practice? I don't know what world you're in.

> SDKs are an enormous effort to create and maintain for every HTTP API,

Hence the attraction of generating client and server stubs with gRPC

> Browsers (and by extension, websites) are not good examples of REST in practice?

The "client" of a website is a human being - and we are very good at interpreting dynamic content.

As an example: There are probably 100+ websites out there where you can book a ticket for a flight. It might be painful, but as a human, I can figure out how to navigate and book a flight on any of those systems.

I challenge you to write a REST client that can do the same.

Every single one of those websites use HTML, a common media type, with semantics defined in that standard. What's missing are the application-level semantics like what's a "flight search" and "flight booking", which can be solved with linked data. In fact, this already exists! [0]

In theory, using a common media type and linked data vocabulary, one can make this hypothetical scenario of an automated machine-to-machine flight booking system happen. In practice, it requires either changing how people think, or build APIs to begin with. It's a steep uphill battle to change how people think, making this happen is much easier.

[0]: https://schema.org/FlightReservation

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