> The original pattern is such a good idea and not even remotely abstract. It's a well defined architectural pattern for a well defined problem yet people still managed to bastardize it to the point that the term REST barely means anything today
The original pattern is extremely abstract and a bad idea. There has been precisely one successful implementation of the original REST "pattern", the web, and only because the pattern was retrofitted onto it; most of the things in REST-as-originally-defined are bad ideas, as any apples-to-apples comparison will show.
I get oppositely frustrated because "REST" was adopted as a rallying cry for one or two good ideas (fitting your protocol to the GET/POST and 2xx/4xx/5xx distinctions from HTTP instead of treating it as a completely opaque transport layer; not wrapping everything in oodles of XML) and the term brought along a lot of bad ideas as baggage. But the meaning of the term shifted towards doing the things that are good because the original meaning was bad.
The original pattern is extremely abstract and a bad idea. There has been precisely one successful implementation of the original REST "pattern", the web, and only because the pattern was retrofitted onto it; most of the things in REST-as-originally-defined are bad ideas, as any apples-to-apples comparison will show.
I get oppositely frustrated because "REST" was adopted as a rallying cry for one or two good ideas (fitting your protocol to the GET/POST and 2xx/4xx/5xx distinctions from HTTP instead of treating it as a completely opaque transport layer; not wrapping everything in oodles of XML) and the term brought along a lot of bad ideas as baggage. But the meaning of the term shifted towards doing the things that are good because the original meaning was bad.