I'm not saying that you haven't seen many successful APIs or even that the one presented in this article won't be successful. All I'm saying is that I don't think it is the way REST APIs are supposed to be done.
This really is the biggest issue with so called REST APIs. The fact that no two developers quite agree on how they should be implemented makes the term REST rather useless. If you called it 'JSON over HTTP' it would tell me more.
In 20 years developing web systems, I've yet to see two REST APIs with a consistent usage pattern. Telling me it is a REST API gives me no information about how to use it at all, which means I always have to create a client library pretty much from scratch each time.
I don't think the term is useless at all. It is very well defined. It annoys me as well that many people mean many different things when using that term. It should just be used less often. Other things are simply not REST. Doesn't mean they are bad, but they are something else.
(I do wish Fielding's work would contain more practical examples, as that would help in understanding. But hey, it's a thesis that describes an architecture style on a very abstract level.)
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I'm not saying that you haven't seen many successful APIs or even that the one presented in this article won't be successful. All I'm saying is that I don't think it is the way REST APIs are supposed to be done.
This really is the biggest issue with so called REST APIs. The fact that no two developers quite agree on how they should be implemented makes the term REST rather useless. If you called it 'JSON over HTTP' it would tell me more.
In 20 years developing web systems, I've yet to see two REST APIs with a consistent usage pattern. Telling me it is a REST API gives me no information about how to use it at all, which means I always have to create a client library pretty much from scratch each time.
I don't think the term is useless at all. It is very well defined. It annoys me as well that many people mean many different things when using that term. It should just be used less often. Other things are simply not REST. Doesn't mean they are bad, but they are something else.
(I do wish Fielding's work would contain more practical examples, as that would help in understanding. But hey, it's a thesis that describes an architecture style on a very abstract level.)