REST is Simplicity

I made my first web page 21 years ago (whaaa… too long ago).

As time goes by, I have more respect to the simple protocol that is HTTP.

It wasn’t really until building RESTful APIs (or ones that aimed in that directly in that case) that I got to appreciate its simplicity.

Reading the O’Reilly book “Restful Web APIs”, which they have distributed for free, I found myself agreeing with the autors immediately:

HTTP’s weakness is its strength, its simplicity its power.

It’s worthwhile to aim for simplicity. It’s all to easy to try to be simple and end up with a more complex solution.

HTTP does its job just fine for the latest RESTful APIs:

The technology is simple but principled:

In that first version of HTTP, cleverly disguised as a lack of features, we can see addressability and statelessness: the two basic design decisions that made HTTP an improvement on its rivals, and that keep it scalable up to today’s mega-sites.

Let’s lean on HTTP when we can:

Too often a programmer or a company brings in Big Web Services for a job that plain old HTTP could handle just fine.

Agreed. And this is my ode to HTTP.