Comment by dSebastien

7 months ago

A few years ago I spent an unreasonable amount of time creating a RESTful API design guide for my employer. The goal was to standardize the way APIs would be created for all systems. We argued over HATEOAS, true REST with hypermedia, custom media types, status codes etc.

We ended up with what I consider to be a solid design guide rooted in the correct use of Web standards. Not REST but RESTful. Clear and understandable, uniform, etc.

At the end of the day though the real challenge was more to make people adhere to those conventions. Why? Because most developers don't care at all. They want to finish their "Agile" sprint on time. They don't care about architecture, correctness, enterprise-wide homogeneity etc. Beyond the lack of ONE actual standard, that's the other real major problem.