Roy Fielding's Misappropriated REST Dissertation (2020)

# · 🔥 195 · 💬 207 · 2 years ago · twobithistory.org · fagnerbrack · 📷
Many more people know that Fielding's dissertation is where REST came from than have read the dissertation, so misconceptions about what the dissertation actually contains are pervasive. I had always assumed, as I imagine many people do, that REST was intended from the get-go as an architectural model for web APIs built on top of HTTP. I thought perhaps that there had been some chaotic experimental period where people were building APIs on top of HTTP all wrong, and then Fielding came along and presented REST as the sane way to do things. You could sum up the part of the dissertation where Fielding introduces REST as, essentially, "Listen, we just designed HTTP, so if you also find yourself designing a distributed hypermedia system you should use this cool architecture we worked out called REST to make things easier." It's not obvious why Fielding thinks anyone would ever attempt to build such a thing given that the web already exists; perhaps in 2000 it seemed like there was room for more than one distributed hypermedia system in the world. We remember Fielding's dissertation now as the dissertation that introduced REST, but really the dissertation is about how much one-size-fits-all software architectures suck, and how you can better pick a software architecture appropriate for your needs. REST gets blindly used for all sorts of networked applications now, but Fielding originally offered REST as an illustration of how to derive a software architecture tailored to an individual application's particular needs. Fielding came up with REST because the web posed a thorny problem of "Anarchic scalability," by which Fielding means the need to connect documents in a performant way across organizational and national boundaries. REST purists often complain, for example, that so-called REST APIs aren't actually REST APIs because they do not use Hypermedia as The Engine of Application State.
Roy Fielding's Misappropriated REST Dissertation (2020)



Send Feedback | WebAssembly Version (beta)