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Comment by guelo

7 years ago

Is idempotency part of HTTP or just part of loose REST conventions?

> loose REST conventions

REST is HTTP. "loose REST conventions" is when someone chose to ignore big chunks of the HTTP spec.

In other words, you can build whatever you want (like SOAP) on top of HTTP and ignore the spec that describes content negotiation, HTTP methods, Caching policies, etc. It's still technically HTTP. But if you were to read the HTTP spec and follow it to a tee, you'd build a REST application.

  • > REST is HTTP

    This is untrue. I hate to quote from Wikipedia, but it sums it up quite nicely: "REST is not a standard in itself, but RESTful implementations make use of standards, such as HTTP, URI, JSON, and XML"

    More colloquially: REST is what happens when people mix up transport layers in their head.

  • > REST is HTTP.

    That's actually backwards; HTTP is the motivating example of REST (that is, REST was developed from observed properties which HTTP/1.0 loosely exhibited and was consciously applied in design of HTTP/1.1.)

  • > you'd build a REST application

    Nah, nerds would come out of the woodwork to inform you that what you've built is not a real REST.

    • Yeah - there's always a HATEOAS comment somewhere and I've never really managed to figure out what that means beyond using URI's rather than a database IDs + some documented endpoint path to point to other resources.

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