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Comment by kowlo | Hacker News Reader

After reading your comment I expected to see low to mediocre activity on their repository... however, 15.1k stars seems to indicate that many do think it's a good idea.

I know GitHub stars are not a measure of whether something is a good idea or not - but why do you think so many have positively engaged with it?

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because actually is a great idea. maybe there are some cases where it’s not the best option, but many times it’s much better option than having to code a custom api code and you can invest that time in building more features instead of dealing with plumbing.

Lots of developers in general doesn't seem to understand the concept of a REST API. What are the benefits? Why are we doing this at all? How to do it properly? Most APIs are not REST, just some RPC-like APIs over HTTP.

When you have a tool like this, it's just easier to use it and call it a day - without thinking too much or learning the concepts properly.

> Most APIs are not REST, just some RPC-like APIs over HTTP.

Can you elaborate this part? Does PostgREST does that? If not, any example of it

I think the point is that many people in the wild conflate the term “REST API” with “arbitrary interaction over HTTP”. We’ve all seen examples, the one-off endpoint to fetch that little tertiary bit of data, that one-off POST to invalidate a cache. None of that is REST

To REST purists, APIs must use HATEOAS to be considered REST.

"HATEOAS" is pretty much the only thing REST contains. "REST API" without HATEOAS has no meaning, it's just a stand-in for "good HTTP citizen" (if even that).

REST isn’t an architecture for designing HTTP API’s; it’s an architecture for designing HTTP itself. https://twobithistory.org/2020/06/28/rest.html

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