I am getting frustrated by the number of people calling any HTTP-based interface a REST API. Today’s example is the SocialSite REST API. That is RPC. It screams RPC. There is so much coupling on display that it should be given an X rating.
REST APIs must be hypertext-driven
Roy Fielding writes a PhD dissertation describing the architectural style of the World Wide Web. He coins the term ‘Representational State Transfer’ (REST) to describe it – after all, if you’re going to talk about something, you need to give it a name. Somehow, in a semantic shift of epic fail proportions, the term REST has also come to mean something completely different to most people, a ‘style’ of writing web services. This style has no agreed protocol.