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Comment by tptacek | Hacker News Reader

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tptacek·

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

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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.

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).

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)

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"

I call them RESTy or sometimes just HTTP APIs.

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