Like other posters have said, the author appears to be pointing out shortcomings with HTTP, not REST. Roy Fielding made it fairly clear that REST is not strictly associated with HTTP. REST, as an architectural style, is defined by a set of constraints: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Representational_state_transfe.... Anything that meets these constraints is considered "REST". Most of the constraints sound like common sense for API design, and where most APIs are disqualified from being truly "REST" and merely "RESTish" is in trying (or not) to fulfill the Uniform Interface/HATEOAS constraint: that the client dynamically traverses information and operations from one resource to another via hypermedia links.

Interestingly there's yet a deeper problem with fully RESTful APIs (Hypermedia APIs), where REST's Stateless Protocol constraint combined with HATEOAS creates an API where clients need to undergo multiple HTTP round trips to load the data they need. For example, suppose your app lets users browse movies. You might have a sequence like:

client: "hey, I'm gonna act like a browser and hit api.com and take it from there" GET api.com => { "movies": { "rel": "content/movies", "href": "/movies" } }

client: "hmm, ok I guess I'll click the movies link" GET api.com/movies => { "items": { "count": 4, "prev": null, "next": "/movies/page/2", [ {"href": "/movies/1"}, {"href": "/movies/2"}, {"href": "/movies/3"}, {"href": "/movies/4"}, ] } }

client: "ok, I guess I'll fetch each of those movies (I kinda wish the server had just told me what those contents were in the first place)" GET api.com/movies/1... etc. => { "href": "/movies/1", "rel": "self", "title": "Waterworld", "image": "/images/waterworld.png", } ...

And don't forget the client-side logic to join/order all this data and handle errors. This problem is called "underfetching" and it's present in true REST APIs by design. Ironically, many "RESTful" APIs break from the REST constraints specifically to avoid this problem.

Another great article on REST APIs: https://martinfowler.com/articles/richardsonMaturityModel.ht...