
You Can't Turn the Network Invisible - mwcampbell
https://www.pandastrike.com/posts/20160622-falcor-relay-leaky-abstractions-fallacies-of-distributed-computing
======
mwcampbell
At the beginning of his presentation, Jafar Husain explained how a team at
Netflix started out with a mostly RESTful API, but then it degraded to RPC.
That suggests to me that REST really wasn't the best fit for their
requirements. It's easy for us to say from the sidelines that they should have
just tried harder to stay pure and follow the REST way. But requirements
change, and the REST architectural style wasn't designed for today's world,
where users don't want to think about the distinction between their devices
and the network. I think it's quite likely that Relay and Falcor, having been
designed by teams working on large-scale consumer applications, really do make
some progress toward solving some problems these teams face better than REST
does.

More generally, I'm skeptical of any hard-line position which insists that you
just have to stay pure and follow the true way. I already rejected one
religion; I don't want to get sucked into another.

~~~
dyoder
We're not religious about REST. For example, see:

[https://www.pandastrike.com/posts/20151215-http-rest-
great-b...](https://www.pandastrike.com/posts/20151215-http-rest-great-better-
developer-experience)

and

[https://www.pandastrike.com/posts/20160210-rest-is-the-
wrong...](https://www.pandastrike.com/posts/20160210-rest-is-the-wrong-way-to-
understand-http)

We've also tried to be specific in how you might approach addressing the
limitations of HTTP in a way more consistent with the design of the protocol:

[https://www.pandastrike.com/posts/20151022-rest-data-
api](https://www.pandastrike.com/posts/20151022-rest-data-api)

and

[https://www.pandastrike.com/posts/20160509-http-is-the-
new-l...](https://www.pandastrike.com/posts/20160509-http-is-the-new-lisp)

In fact, our thesis in this article is not about REST at all, but the design
goals of projects like Falcor, which may be unrealistic. And it's those
unrealistic expectations of what's possible are why people are turning from
HTTP.

~~~
mwcampbell
OK, I was wrong to accuse you of being religious about REST. Thanks for the
links.

~~~
dyoder
:)

