Hacker News Reader

Comment by programmarchy | Hacker News Reader

For most APIs that doesn’t deliver any value which can’t be gained from API docs, so it’s hard to justify. However, these days it could be very useful if you want an AI to be able to navigate your API. But MCP has the spotlight now.

View on HN

And that's fine, but then you're doing RPC instead of REST and we should all be clear and honest about that.

I think you throw away a useful description of an API by lumping them all under RPC. If you tell me your API is RPC instead of REST then I'll assume that:

* If the API is available over HTTP then the only verb used is POST.

* The API is exposed on a single URL and the `method` is encoded in the body of the request.

It is true, if you say "RPC" I'm more likely to assume gRPC or something like that. If you say "REST", I'm 95% confident that it is a standard / familiar OpenAPI style json-over-http style API but will reserve a 5% probability that it is actually HATEOAS and have to deal with that. I'd say, if you are doing Roy Fielding certified REST / HATEOAS it is non-standard and you should call it out specifically by using the term "HATEOAS" to describe it.

What would it take for you to update your assumptions?

People in the real world referring to "REST" APIs, the kind that use HTTP verbs and have routes like /resource/id as RPC APIs. As it stands in the world outside of this thread nobody does that.

At some level language is outside of your control as an individual even if you think it's literally wrong--you sometimes have to choose between being 'correct' and communicating clearly.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com