Comment by hardwaresofton
7 years ago
At the risk of being overly pedantic/piling on -- this is what bad REST-ful API design looks like in practice.
When you talk to your teammates about the semantics of these verbs and someone just says "oh a GET is fine" and the team agrees but you don't and you can't say it so you don't become "that guy" it's time to find a new engineering org to be a part of.
On the topic of PATCH, check out JSON merge patches (application/merge-patch+json):
I hope this doesn't come across as mean-spirited, but I'm really struck by the middle part of your comment, even though I think it was meant as a throwaway remark.
It sounds like you're advocating leaving an organisation instead of speaking up when a mistake is being made? In the scenario you described, the "a GET is fine" person is unfamiliar with the protocol they're writing for (HTTP), and so is every person who agreed. Leaving instead of speaking up seems pretty drastic.
Totally valid question -- it was indeed a throwaway remark but is pretty bitter in tone now that I think about it.
To delve into what I was thinking a little bit I think it came off so bitter because I've been in too many orgs where group-thinking squashed dissenting possibly-correct opinions, where half the room is wondering "this seems too complex, why are we doing this" but everyone goes with it. Reading through the twitter comments had a bunch of people were trying to gloss over the misuse and it might have triggered me.
The more reasonable response is definitely to articulate and explain why a GET is NOT fine in that case so everyone learns, but once this starts happening a lot I mark it as a red flag in my head -- it's either a culture clash or I'm too close to being the most experienced in the room (in that specific area), and that means there are less people to learn from and staying for too long might lead to stagnating. The "leave the org" bit is hyperbole, but I worry about this kind of thing if I experience it.
In the end though, it was meant to be a humorous post so the remark is overblown.
My interpretation is that GP is advocating leaving an org if you feel that speaking up is discouraged
Just be the guy who says "oh a POST is fine" first
Yeah, full REST is nice, but you can do worse than just using GET and POST as long as GET doesn't change state.
Layers of REST that people get to:
1. GET is good for everything
2. Perhaps we should use POST too
3. Let's use all the verbs
4. Someone mentions HATEOAS
5. Some old guy says that you've got to use XML because that defines links and JSON doesn't
6. Someone else counters with JSON-LD and sends a link to the W3 spec
That's as far as I got. Mostly this conversation happens in my head.
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I've had to develop APIs for clients that could only do GET or POST requests. Sometimes you have to sacrifice correctness for what's actually possible.
Hadn't seen that RFC before. We were doing almost exactly that on a large API project a year or so before that RFC was published. Backend guys hated it, front end guys loved it.