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Comment by terra_t | Hacker News Reader

Also, the term REST is usually used by people who don't know what the hell it actually means. For instance, people say that Twitter, Amazon, Ebay, just about everybody have "REST APIs" but they really have "POX" (Plain Old XML) or "POJ" (Plain Old Json) APIs.

I've had both good and bad experiences with SOAP. I remember wasting a few days figuring out how to get a PHP app to authenticate against an ASP.NET SOAP implementation... I did get the auth to work, but then I ran into other problems, and we found these bozos had a competitor that had a simple POX api that took five minutes to get working.

On the other hand, there was the day I pointed Visual Studio at the WSDL file for the Salesforce.com API and was quite astonished to see it build all the stubs for a very complex API with just the click of a mouse and no hitches at all.

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If we just stipulate that "REST-ful" means "REST-ish", can we avoid an unproductive academic debate?

I actually like your terminology more but I've generally heard the term Hi-REST and Low-REST in this context

http://www.25hoursaday.com/weblog/PermaLink.aspx?guid=0df3b4...

REST-ful = REST-ish

REST-ish = ?

The debate still exists, it's just moved. You're still going to have people calling anything with HTTP in it REST-ish just because it's another nice acronym to pad their resume.

> You're still going to have people calling anything with HTTP in it REST-ish

aka "SOAP is RESTful"

And so REST-ful ends up meaning "having no relation at all with REST beyond the buzzwords and being over HTTP"?

By that definision, SOAP is restful.

How about we call something a HTTP-based API, when we want to distinguish it from full REST, or SOAP, etc? Or say JSON/HTTP or XML/HTTP.

And how do you define whether something is "HTTP-based" or not? Because using HTTP is not quite a good enough condition: SOAP can use HTTP as a transport, and XML-RPC has always done that (I'm not sure it allows any other transport).

I call them RESTy or sometimes just HTTP APIs.

At what point does it go from "there is a widespread misuse of this term" to "it's an academic debate"?

These days, "REST" is no better than "Web 2.0".

(Okay, it's not as bad as Web 2.0 but it's certainly a buzzword)

No.

I'm not worried about the people who think REST = !SOAP.

I'm worried about the people who think they understand REST, build systems, and discover too late that they've got to rebuild their whole communication protocol because performance and reliability are just a disaster.

So it's not just an academic debate, it's about the difference between systems that work and systems that don't.

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