What REST has to be
Posted by billburke on September 8, 2009
I’ve been getting a lot of concern internally at Red Hat as I’ve been pushing for all our products and projects to have a RESTful interface. Some scorn that there’s no way you can model such complex interactions with PUT, POST, GET, and DELETE. Many see it as yet another bullshit rehash of distributed protocols. This is what I promise them:
- Simplicity
- Low footprint requirements.
- True interoperability. (SOAP interoperability is a joke).
- Flexibility.
If REST and our RESTful interfaces do not have these properties, then I’ve failed. I really don’t care in the end if any of the architectural principles of Roy’s thesis are broken as long these requirements are met. Pragmatism has to be the most important thing here. We can’t fall into religious and academic debates on the purity of a distributed interface.
Markus Kohler said
Agree, also I think proper caching support is one of the main benefits of a RESTful interface.
You can subsume it under “low footprint” if you want
Tareq Abedrabbo said
Cultural aspects are just as crucial in this kind of effort as technical ones. It won’t be easy without a strong support from your employer I think. It would be interesting to see how things turn out though. Good luck and keep us posted please!
Mark Little said
Well put Bill! This is the way forward for JBoss/Red Hat.
John Scott said
I really don’t care in the end if any of the architectural principles of Roy’s thesis are broken as long these requirements are met.
If you don’t follow REST’s architectural principles, I don’t care what you call it, but don’t call it RESTful.
William Vambenepe’s blog » Blog Archive » REST-*: good specs, bad branding? said
[...] bad bargain to me if you want to get things done. But Bill Burke (who works with Mark on this) has chosen to accept it: “I really don’t care in the end if any of the architectural principles of Roy’s thesis [...]
neo said
John Scott,
You don’t get to dictate to what it is called. Stop being so religious about it.