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Most RESTful APIs aren't really RESTful


When talking about REST, it is worth reading the dissertation of Roy Thomas Fielding. The original paper that describes RESTful web, “Architectural Styles and the Design of Network-based Software Architectures” Roy T. Fielding (2000), introduces the Representational State Transfer (REST) architectural style as a framework for designing scalable, performant, and maintainable networked systems, particularly web services.

Fielding demonstrates how REST principles shape the success of the web, advocating for its adoption in designing distributed systems with universal, stateless interfaces and clear resource-based interactions. HATEOAS is a fundamental principle of REST, requiring that the client dynamically discover actions and interactions through hypermedia links embedded in server responses, rather than relying on out-of-band knowledge (e.g., API documentation). Familiar examples include an electronic document, an image, a source of information with a consistent purpose(e.g., “today’s weather report for Los Angeles”), a service (e.g., an HTTP-to-SMS gateway), and a collection of other resources.

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