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Is REST the New SOAP?

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Almost a decade ago there was a flurry of activity around REST and SOAP based systems. Several authors wrote about the pros and cons of one or the other, or when you should consider using one instead of the other. However, with much attention moving away from SOAP-based Web Services to REST and HTTP, the arguments and discussions died down and many SOA practitioners adopted REST (or plain HTTP) as the basis for their distributed systems. However, recently Pakal De Bonchamp wrote an article called "REST is the new SOAP" in which he compares using REST to "a testimony to insanity".

His article is long and detailed but some of the key points he makes include the complexity, in his view, of simply exposing a straightforward API which could be done via an RPC mechanism in "a few hours" yet with REST can take much longer. Why? Because:

No more standards, no more precise specifications. Just a vague “RESTful philosophy”, prone to endless metaphysical debates, and as many ugly workarounds.

The mapping of the methods to CRUD operations is not straightforward. How do you determine whether and when to create new resource instances rather than re-using an existing resource? HTTP error codes are limited, in his view, and impose problems when trying to express richer error situations. And his list goes on. The end result?

And you’re gone for hours, reinventing the wheel. Not even a tailored, smart wheel. A broken and fragile wheel, requiring tons of documentation to be understood, and violating specifications without even knowing it.

He dives into a lot of detail on specific HTTP verbs, including PUT and rarely discussed PATCH and DELETE:

You want to use PUT to update your resource? OK, but some Holy Specifications state that the data input has to be equivalent to the representation received via a GET. So what do you do with the numerous read-only parameters returned by GET (creation time, last update time, server-generated token…)? You omit them and violate the PUT principles? You include them anyway, and expect an “HTTP 409 Conflict” if they don’t match server-side values (forcing you to then issue a GET...)? You give them random values and expect servers to ignore them (the joy of silent errors)? Pick your poison, REST clearly has no clue what a read-only attribute it, and this won’t be fixed anytime soon. Meanwhile, a GET is dangerously supposed to return the password (or credit card number) which was sent in a previous POST/PUT; good luck dealing with such write-only parameters too. Did I forget to mention that PUT also brings dangerous race conditions, where several clients will override each other’s changes, whereas they just wanted to update different fields?

Error handling, REST architectural concepts and many other aspects get a detailed review and don't come away well. For both REST supporters and those who aren't convinced, the article is worth reading. He concludes with the following:

Almost-transparent remote procedure call was what 99% people really needed, and existing protocols, as imperfect as they were, did the job just fine. This mass monomania for the lowest common denominator of the web, HTTP, has mainly resulted in a huge waste of time and grey matter. REST promised simplicity and delivered complexity.
REST promised robustness and delivered fragility.
REST promised interoperability and delivered heterogeneity.
REST is the new SOAP.

Reading through the many comments on the article it is clear some people agree with him but the majority disagree, pointing out numerous flaws in his argument. For example, Filippos Vasilakis states:

Maybe you should take a look on Roy’s thesis. What you are attacking here is the common misconception of REST. As Roy noted in his thesis REST might not fit all cases, but it fits pretty good the case where you can’t control the client. So, if you know any other model that is self-descriptive and thus evolvable let us know. Because REST is all about that. Talking to devices/clients/hardware that we don’t/can’t control (like mobile app in apple store which needs 10 days to deploy a new change, if your update does not get rejected by Apple, sensor devices that you can’t even access/update etc). For those scenarios we have REST and then comes GraphQL with many limitations and issues. But if you come up with another model that solves the issue of evolvability please let us know. RPC is not one of them.

Another comment, this time from a Vlad Ko:

Ouch. What did I just read? You are complaining about taking your time to architect a decent API? I believe that’s your responsibility and a goal as a developer to ensure that. Complaining about every REST-related or “unrelated” issue under the sun is meaningless and kind of childish. Every language, protocol, specification and concept has problems, bugs, illogical syntax, slow VM’s, lack of type, too strict, too loose, too functional, not enough OOP.Welcome to the world of software engineering.

And from Christopher Patti:

This is an excellent article. It has the punch of a rant but makes its case in a well reasoned detailed way with a lot of supporting evidence. There’s one factor you don’t discuss though — tooling. People gave up on the paragon of logical purity that SOAP is or was if your article is to be believed, because if you weren’t doing your work in either Java or .NET the tooling was really, *really* awful. I’m told it’s gotten better, but when people feel pain they react to that pain by adopting new tools. I get that your thesis is that we may have chosen an unfortunate path and should move on, but to what? You cite other more modern protocols, but I’d be curious about specific examples you can cite that could work as a direct replacement for either SOAP or REST.

As well as the comments, the original article promoted a lot of activity on various social media platforms. Eventually Phil Sturgeon, platform engineer at WeWork, wrote an article called simply "A Response to REST is the new SOAP" because apparently many people had asked him to refute claims made in the original article.

The entire article is full of common misunderstandings about REST and HTTP. Despite dedicating my career to trying to educate people through these confusions, they continue to be rife. Clearly I am not being loud enough, writing effectively enough, or doing a good enough job. That is the frustration you might hear in my writing, but nothing is aimed at the author.

As with the initial article, this response is long and Sturgeon dissects the problems with REST which De Bonchamp had discussed in lots of detail. For example, to De Bonchamps's reference about building "a broken and fragile wheel", Sturgeon has this to say:

Ok this is frustrating. REST APIs are often mocked because the proponents explain that you should not need documentation. A REST API absolutely should not need documentation, but I have spent the last few months working on generating documentation for our APIs, because they are all RPC APIs. When an API represents its own state, uses hypermedia to declare its affordances, and provides a contract, you can chose to generate human readable documentation, but that's only going there for people treating the REST API like a RPC API… A REST API quite definitively requires less documentation, unless you've just built an unspecified RPC which is pretending to be REST, like so many people do.

To De Bonchamps's discussion on the perils of PUT et al, "This sounds like a frustration born from not understanding the purpose of PUT." The dissection and responses from Sturgeon go on and on. In fact even without reading the original article, Sturgeon's response is worth reading on its own merits. But the general underlying thread throughout is that much, if not all, of De Bonchamp's complaints around REST are due to his misunderstandings. Sturgeon concludes with:

I get it, REST is a complex topic. Too many people think they understand it, and are falsely validated when they bump into other people who don't understand it. Folks everywhere are building RESTish APIs which are basically just RPC + HTTP verbs + Pretty URLs, and as that doesn't seem very helpful they write giant articles explaining why that's not very useful…

And that might have been that. However, it seems that Sturgeon and De Bonchamp have continued to have discussions and Sturgeon has written a further update.

I'm still having a productive dialog with the author, helping him understand how REST works. I thought it might interest some of you too.

Hopefully the interested reader will check it out and see how the conversation is evolving.

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Community comments

  • I'd be really interested to hear...

    by Jean-Jacques Dubray,

    Your message is awaiting moderation. Thank you for participating in the discussion.

    ...what Stefan Tilkov, Tim Bray, Bill Burk, Steve Vinosky have to say about the uniform interface, nouns, documentation-as-a-contract, hypermedia. Perhaps they could explain why is it that we are hand coding SDKs for different languages?
    What a waste. A decade and we are not even back where we were in 2007 with XML Schema and WSDL.

  • power to the people

    by Florian Sommer,

    Your message is awaiting moderation. Thank you for participating in the discussion.

    Yes, of course, everyone who complains about REST is not really doing REST. But then you must ask yourself: is the problem the people or is it REST?

    I am not only a “Nerdy-Techie” but also somewhat of an “UX enthusiast”… so here is one of the golden rules that I’ve learned over the course of learning about good UX: If your System – as ingenious as it might appears to yourself – is not usable by anyone… the problem is NOT the user! It’s never the user’s fault, because *your* duty as the designer of a system is to make it usable for your target group.

    Same is true to architecture, IMHO. If your devs are not able to solve their day to day problems without violating your architecture, it’s not the dev’s fault. Because your job is to build architecture that works in your context; and your context includes your team. You as an architect need to make the WHOLE SYSTEM work and the system includes technology but also all the people involved.

    So, if “true REST” is so damn complicated, that 99% of people, who think they are doing it right, are doing it wrong, the problem is not the people.

    In the year 2018, there must be a way to make machines talk to each other, that does not require a 2 years studies in RESTafarian culture.

  • Fair but...

    by Sam Siddiqi,

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    The industry is full of examples of technological shifts that see new technologies ultimately inheriting some of the problems that were faced with the older ones.

    With REST in particular, a lot of us had differing reasons for abandoning SOAP/WS-* in favour of something "simpler". It wasn't necessarily a desire to move away from RPC, in fact even with a SOAPy web service we adopted the doc-lit pattern wholesale which (in our minds) was conceptually very different than RPC. Interoperability at the time was an issue, the complexity and expense of implementing/adopting the full WS-* range of specifications, etc.

    Our need at the time was primarily data integration, and serving up resources (serialized data) through simple CRUDy interfaces suited REST-like web services just fine, and such use-cases naturally lined up with the Fielding constraints. Then our needs shifted: workflows, asynchronous processes, complex editing cases (partial updates, optimistic concurrency control), and now full-blown, public facing Web APIs.

    This is what stresses any technical choice - a change in context. Perhaps we shouldn't have abandoned SOAP, or CORBA/DCOM, or RPC, or whatever came before. Each, I feel, presumes a certain optimal context for the technologies to be used in. That inherently limits the generality of the technology. To bring forth the benefits of any one would require bloating the other.

  • This has nothing to do with SOAP

    by Will Hartung,

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    REST never got any traction. The only traction REST got was the complete misrepresentation of pretty much "anything" over HTTP as REST. And it went downhill from there.

    The real benefit of REST is for the client. The most "resty-ist" applications we have are the ubiquitous web apps managed by human beings. Human beings, most of the time, can act as a "sufficiently smart" client and navigate and work a REST interface.

    The simplest example of this is that one day you go to your favorite shopping cart and find that is now asking for a phone number on checkout, whereas before it didn't. Well, you as a evolved Carbon Based Lifeform can actually manage fill that field in.

    A simple API/Interface change handled easily by the client. The client in this case was not the web browser that simply rendered the request (that's a separate issue). The client was the person filling it out.

    On the other hand, consider the application of filing income taxes. You see these forms, with all these boxes to fill in, and even references to instructions on how to fill those boxes in. We also know that those forms can remain the same, subtly change, or dramatically change from year to year. Yet, for many, even with the instructions, the forms are inscrutable.

    The problem here is not that the forms are not documented, or even self documented. The problem is the client (Joe/Jane Random Taxpayer) doesn't understand the documentation.

    Extend this concept to stone cold bone headed total stupidity of a computer program, and you start to see the issue.

    REST documentation is in the MEDIA TYPE, not the URLs that are called. The media type is documented, telling you whats in it and, most importantly, what links are for what processes. Then the payload direct the client along the workflow. "From here, you can go and do these things."

    HTML is a crummy media type for computer applications because it's underspecified for most application scenarios. It's too generic. It works great for humans, as most pages have instructions that combined with "common sense" (HAHAHA) guide the client (the user) through the workflow. But for machine to machine interaction? Ha...no.

    Companies and developers tend to not create "sufficiently smart" clients to work against hypermedia payload and APIs. They don't because it's expensive, and far, far cheaper to send out fixes to API changes. Write specifically to an API of the proper version and quietly, gently deprecate those APIs over time. "Sorry, we don't support v1.0 any more -- go update."

    Yet, I can still actually navigate the web and do things using something like Lynx, a text based web browser. Talk about your v1.0 clients.

    So, REST is not the new SOAP because pretty much nobody needs, much less uses, something like REST at the machine level. The app vendors control the server (the API they promote), and the clients (either the web experience users use, or the downloaded mobile apps they provide). Even if you use something like Amazon AWS, ostensibly HTTP APIs, does anyone honestly use them, or do they just use the "latest AWS client for their platform"?

    Anybody working with AWS has had their stuff broken by Amazon by fiat to wit you were out of luck and "down" until you fixed it.

    Caveat emptor.

  • My follow-up on the real, initial, REST

    by Pakal De Bonchamp,

    Your message is awaiting moderation. Thank you for participating in the discussion.

    Indeed the conversation continued, it even led to a new article, a desperate attempt at understanding what was so great about "true" RESTfulness.

    Here it is, enjoy: medium.freecodecamp.org/follow-up-to-rest-is-th...

  • Duh - WSDL and SOAP were idiocy; REST is just stupid

    by Cliff Berg,

    Your message is awaiting moderation. Thank you for participating in the discussion.

    Both violate fundamental computer science principles. Use a transport protocol for your application protocol? - OMG. What a mess. And what a transport protocol to choose - HTTP!!! code.google.com/archive/p/browsersec/wikis/Part...

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