Introspected REST: An Alternative to REST and GraphQL

introspected.rest

If you're trying to solve problems caused REST not being a protocol, why not settle with defining -- or better yet, using an already defined -- protocol? Really, there were plenty of good RPC protocols, starting with XML-RPC and a little more modern incarnation of JSON-RPC 2.0.

RPC is not evolvable neither self descriptive so it's very difficult to introduce changes on API used by remote clients, without human interaction.

On the other hand, REST allows exactly what changes to the API that don't require modification of remote clients? Because hypertext only allows to move boundaries where data is split into chunks returned at one call, not how the data looks like, and it's the structure of the data that mainly changes with API.

REST allows you to change the structure of the data as well, for instance using linked-data specs, like schema.org. However, in practice it's very difficult and also REST makes it very difficult to evolve different parts of the API, asyncronously.

Here we propose Introspected REST which gives you much more flexibility and solves such issues through introspectable content provided by various MicroTypes the API uses.

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