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Comment by lmilcin | Hacker News Reader

REST is a very specific idea about exchanging states of resources rather than sending commands. The idea did not evolve and it is still useful to talk about it and use it the way it was intended.

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I stopped using the term REST for anything I've worked on/with years ago. I just call them Web APIs and no one has ever cared beyond that. REST as an idea is still ineresting, REST as a buzzword feels as dated as "Web 2.0" at this point.

I think this really is the correct approach. I have come across so many differing interpretations of what is properly “RESTful” over the years. Even worse, I have found myself in technical discussions where we were more focused on following proper RESTful API principles rather than simply going with what works best for our use case.

I think it’s useful to read and understand the concepts in Fielding’s dissertation. But don’t set out to build a RESTful API. Set out to build the most appropriate API for the problem you are solving, which may or may not involve incorporating various elements from Fielding’s dissertation.

There's a dissertation and thousands of articles(one if which this comments section links to) that go into all the minutiae of a "proper" REST implementation. My comment poses the idea that an understanding of the proper or pure implementation isn't as important as the broad concepts that you are saying define the whole idea of REST. On the crux of the argument, we are in agreement - those academic details don't really matter.

The thing is, nobody can agree on those broad concepts because they are too vague. On every technical interview I’m asking one question „what is REST?“ usually followed by another „how is different from RPC?“ The answers Usually differ so much, that there’s no way to understand what kind of API these people are describing. It’s like in that tale about six blind men, describing an elephant after touching different parts of its body: one said elephant is like a snake, because he touched only the trunk. Another compared it to a tree after touching a leg. And so on.

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