Top all-time · #585
Roy T. Fielding
Personal blog · roy.gbiv.com/untangledwebprogramming
Roy T. Fielding's personal blog at roy.gbiv.com covers web and programming. Since 2008, 105 different Hacker News readers have linked it 169 times, most often “REST APIs must be hypertext-driven”. No feed was found, so read it on the site itself.
Rarely recommended · 5 of 40 sampled comments recommend it?
Why HN links it
HN readers cite Fielding's posts to define REST and HATEOAS, arguing that hypermedia is required; a few point to his posts as the best starting point.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 40 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Most-linked posts?
- REST APIs must be hypertext-driven56 people · 79 mentions · first linked 2008-10-25
- REST APIs must be hypertext-driven (2008)30 people · 43 mentions · first linked 2018-07-19
- It is okay to use POST7 people · 11 mentions · first linked 2009-03-21
- Paper tigers and hidden dragons4 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2008-09-04
- /untangled/tag/rest2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2010-10-15
- /untangled/2008/rest-apis-must-be-hypertext-driven2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2020-11-21
- /untangled/2008/rest-apis-must-be-hypertext-driven2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2015-01-25
- /untangled/2009/it-is-okay-to-use-post2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2018-12-17
- Economies of Scale (Roy Fielding)2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2008-09-23
What Hacker News says?
I am not the authority on what REST is. That would be Roy Fielding, who has explicitly stated that hypermedia is a requirement[1]. So go ahead and tell Mr. Fielding that his definition of REST is incorrect. I am well aware that REST no longer means what it originally described, which is why I think it should go by another term that is not burdened by being a marketing buzzword. [1]: http://roy.gbiv.com/untangled/200…
Comment linking /untangled/2008/rest-apis-must-be-hypertext-driven
on “API Design Guide”Submitted It is okay to use POST as a story · 29 points
HN discussionFWIW, Roy Fielding's paper[1] on REST (where the word comes from) was very specific that a REST api is a hypermedia/hypertext based api, and that if it isn't hypermedia, it isn't REST. He clarified[2] this later on. This isn't from some internet toughguy, but the guy who literally coined the phrase. Sadly, his implementation was also all XML so gross, but you get the idea. HATEOS is just an implementation of a JSON…
Comment linking /untangled/2008/rest-apis-must-be-hypertext-driven
on “API Design Guide”Submitted REST APIs must be hypertext-driven (2008) as a story · 27 points
HN discussion> I think you are confusing discoverability with navigation. I'm not. I understand why it's hard to swallow though, because I think a valid criticism of the REST architectural style is that it removes bookmark-ability. > It's good if you can discover all content through hypermedia, but why should you prevent direct access?! Well, precisely because direct access implies that out-of-band knowledge is driving the inter…
Comment linking /untangled/2008/rest-apis-must-be-hypertext-driven
on “Burying the URL”Submitted Specialization (and REST) as a story · 14 points
HN discussionYes. Hypermedia references are a requirement for something to be considered RESTful: http://roy.gbiv.com/untangled/2008/rest-apis-must-be-hyperte... .
Comment linking /untangled/2008/rest-apis-must-be-hypertext-driven
on “Nobody Understands REST or HTTP”Submitted Paper tigers and hidden dragons as a story · 12 points
HN discussion> URLs are a mix of procedures (/tsearch, literally everything below /rpc) and function names Perhaps you'd be surprised in knowing that a resource can be a stored procedure, quoting Roy Fielding[1]: "a single resource can be the equivalent of a database stored procedure, with the power to abstract state changes over any number of storage items" In general I think PostgREST's REST implementation is evolving. Also, w…
Comment linking /untangled/2008/rest-apis-must-be-hypertext-driven
on “PostgREST: REST API for any Postgres database”Submitted REST APIs must be hypertext-driven as a story · 10 points
HN discussion> I've continued to think about that since how different is it really to have the "secret" be in the URL vs in a token you submit as part of the request for the URL Extremely different. The former depends on the existence of a contract about URL privacy (not to mention third parties actually adhering to it) when no such contract exists. Any design for an auth/auth mechanism that depends on private links is inherentl…
Comment linking /untangled/2008/rest-apis-must-be-hypertext-driven
on “You cannot simply publicly access private secure links, can you?”Submitted Father of HTTP and REST: REST APIs must be hypertext-driven as a story · 9 points
HN discussionHATEOAS. http://roy.gbiv.com/untangled/2008/rest-apis-must-be-hyperte... . I read this and still have no clue!
Comment linking /untangled/2008/rest-apis-must-be-hypertext-driven
on “Ask HN: What is your go-to example for a good REST API?”Submitted REST APIs must be hypertext-driven » Untangled as a story · 4 points
HN discussionI agree: a lot of folks don't think a hypermedia response is an API response, which maybe deserves its own essay. A hypermedia response is an API response for a hypermedia client , and additional possible API calls to the server are then discovered within that hypermedia response via hypermedia controls (e.g. links and forms) At least, that's my position, but I understand that many people would not call this an API…
Comment linking /untangled/2008/specialization
on “How did REST come to mean the opposite of REST?”Submitted Roy T. Fielding: REST APIs must be hypertext-driven (2008) as a story · 3 points
HN discussionBy my read of this "REST API" is a near oxymoron. It was never supposed to be an "API" in the sense that a program consumes it. It was originally described as "Representational State Transfer (REST) architectural style for distributed hypermedia systems" with a focus on describing resources in generic ways for consumption by hypermedia systems (not arbitrary programs!). I think this is most clearly described by two…
Comment linking /untangled/2008/rest-apis-must-be-hypertext-driven
on “How did REST come to mean the opposite of REST?”Submitted Economies of Scale (Roy Fielding) as a story · 3 points
HN discussion> Should REST without HATEOAS classify as REST? Why not? Because what got backnamed HATEOAS is the very core of what Fielding called REST: https://roy.gbiv.com/untangled/2008/rest-apis-must-be-hypert... Everything else is window dressing.
Comment linking /untangled/2008/rest-apis-must-be-hypertext-driven
on “Most RESTful APIs aren't really RESTful”Submitted Paper tigers and hidden dragons (by Roy Fielding) as a story · 3 points
HN discussionThe best way to understand REST is by example. First check out the blog post by Roy Fielding mentioned in this thread which summarizes the constraints [1]. Then let's examine how several popular restful services work versus those constraints. Here are some popular well-known services to use as examples: Google.com Amazon.com Facebook.com News.ycombinator.com. - You enter these services through the site root with no…
Comment linking /untangled/2008/rest-apis-must-be-hypertext-driven
on “Microsoft REST API Guidelines”Submitted Any HTTP-based interface is not a REST API(2008) as a story · 2 points
HN discussionI suggest you go to the original source, ie, Roy Fielding: https://www.ics.uci.edu/~fielding/pubs/dissertation/rest_arc... http://roy.gbiv.com/untangled/tag/rest https://www.infoq.com/articles/roy-fielding-on-versioning
Comment linking /untangled/tag/rest
on “Microsoft REST API Guidelines”Submitted REST APIs must be hypertext-driven (2008) as a story · 2 points
HN discussionNot sure about your karma sacrifice, but if someone has doubts: > What needs to be done to make the REST architectural style clear on the > notion that hypertext is a constraint? In other words, if the engine of > application state (and hence the API) is not being driven by hypertext, > then it cannot be RESTful and cannot be a REST API. Period. Is there > some broken manual somewhere that needs to be fixed? That's…
Comment linking /untangled/2008/rest-apis-must-be-hypertext-driven
on “Microsoft REST API Guidelines”Submitted Roy Fielding's Talks as a story · 2 points
HN discussionHATEOAS is crucial to what [Roy Fielding]( https://roy.gbiv.com/untangled/2008/rest-apis-must-be-hypert... ) calls REST APIs. >A REST API must not define fixed resource names or hierarchies (an obvious coupling of client and server). Servers must have the freedom to control their own namespace. Instead, allow servers to instruct clients on how to construct appropriate URIs, such as is done in HTML forms and URI temp…
Comment linking /untangled/2008/rest-apis-must-be-hypertext-driven
on “Understanding gRPC, OpenAPI and REST and when to use them in API design (2020)”Submitted The WAKA Protocol [pdf] as a story · 2 points
HN discussionTechnically they're right, though; the textbook definition of REST is rare to nonexistent in my experience. What people do instead is create JSON-RPCs-over-HTTP APIs, sometimes following a REST-like URL scheme, and sometimes using different HTTP verbs on the same URL to perform different actions as one would in REST... but the API isn't really REST. The creator of REST has gone on the record multiple times about how…
Comment linking /untangled/2008/rest-apis-must-be-hypertext-driven
on “Understanding gRPC, OpenAPI and REST and when to use them in API design (2020)”Submitted REST APIs must be hypertext-driven (2008) as a story · 1 points
HN discussion
