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Comment by psadauskas | Hacker News Reader

Furthering our wanderings down this off-topic thread, I agree with you completely, but every time I point it out, I get accused of being a "pedant". I've implemented several truly restful APIs, and they've always worked beautifully, but they're internal or private. I tell others about it, and the immense advantages, but they see every other HTTP-RPC API out there and copy that instead.

Why is it that there's no examples of a truly restful web service in practice? The only one I can think of offhand is Sun Cloud's API, which is pretty dead. Its hard to espouse the virtues of a truly restful API when there aren't any examples to point at.

Edit: The downvotes would seem to just further my point...

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If you say you've written some very RESTful APIs internally, perhaps writing an article about the things you've specifically done from most APIs that makes yours RESTful and advantageous vs. a less RESTful API.

I do, periodically. The last one, though, was a couple years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=713959

Be sure to read the first comment. I've sorta given up blogging about it, because I'm tired of fighting it. I am working on a side project, though, which exposes an actual Restful API, so maybe once I can use it as an example, I'll be able to blog more.

Thanks for writing that post. Very clear and informative.

I upvoted you.

I would like to learn how to do REST "right", and (for me) it's easier to learn by playing with a working example that deals with "real world" issues as opposed to abstract snippets that only show how APIs get used.

Any further insights/examples/pointers would be greatly appreciated.

I've been using CouchDB in a personal project for 6 months or so and it's been my first real exposure to an actual RESTful interface and I have to say that the experience has been pretty pleasant. I started working through the examples using curl in the CouchDB - The Definitive Guide and then moved on to building code to interface with it:

http://guide.couchdb.org/

Subbu Allamaraju (ex-Yahoo, now eBay) has been the one proponent of REST that I believe speaks the most sense.

He understands that most "RESTful" APIs out there leave HATEOS as an afterthought, but he doesn't believe there is such a thing as a 100% RESTful API - you match the architectural style to the context of the problem you are trying to solve.

http://www.subbu.org/

Saw Subbu speak at RestFest on Saturday. His talk seemed to promote REST as a set of constraints which produces a set of benefits. He argues that choosing a subset of constraints to achieve a subset of benefits is perfectly valid.

I would add that you must first have a deep understanding of the constraints and their associated benefits in order to make those types of informed decisions about your system's architecture. In my experience, the constraints are so orthogonal that a great number of the benefits of a system created using the REST architectural style only become evident in the overlap as the constraints empower each other.

Combining these constraints can elicit new benefits.

Twilio is pretty close.

I hadn't looked at theirs before, but yeah, its a lot better than most. AFAICT, still doesn't have a single point of entry, but the response documents do have links to other resources, rather than IDs.

Single point of entry: https://api.twilio.com/

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