Readit NewsIn fact, the overtly robotic voices added to the humor of the original, IMO. It was lost in this translation.
The creator of REST, Roy Fielding, literally said this loud and clear:
> REST APIs must be hypertext-driven
> What needs to be done to make the REST architectural style clear on the notion that hypertext is a constraint? In other words, if the engine of application state (and hence the API) is not being driven by hypertext, then it cannot be RESTful and cannot be a REST API. Period.
— https://roy.gbiv.com/untangled/2008/rest-apis-must-be-hypert...
I think of all the people in the world, the creator of REST gets to say what is and isn’t REST.
REST API became colloquially defined as "HTTP API with hierarchical URL structure, usually JSON". I wrote about the very phenomenon 15 years ago! https://www.mobomo.com/2010/04/rest-isnt-what-you-think-it-i...
I had the post pretty much done, went on vacation for a week, and Claude Skills came out in the interim.
That being said Skills are indeed an implementation of the patterns possible with linking, but they are narrower in scope than what's possible even with MCP Resources if they were properly made available to agents (e.g. dynamic construction of context based on environment and/or fetching from remote sources).
> This never worked in practice. Building hypertext APIs was too cumbersome and to actually consume APIs a human needed to understand the API structure in a useful manner anyway.
Every time I read one of these comments I feel like DiCaprio's character in Inception going "but we did grow old together." HATEOAS worked phenomenally. Every time you go to a webpage with buttons and links in HTML that describe what the webpage is capable of (its API, if you will), you are doing HATEOAS [0]. That this interface can be consumed by both a user (via the browser) and a web scraper (via some other program) is the foundation of modern web infrastructure.
It's a little ironic that the explosion of information made possible by HATEOAS happened while the term it self largely got misunderstood, but such is life. Much like reclaiming the proper usage of its close cousin, "REST," using HATEOAS correctly is helpful for properly identifying what made the world's largest hypermedia system successful—useful if you endeavor to design a new one [1].
[0] https://htmx.org/essays/hateoas/
[1] https://unplannedobsolescence.com/blog/why-insist-on-a-word/
The missing piece was having machines that could handle enough ambiguity to "understand" the structure of the API without it needing to be generic to the point of uselessness.
At Firebase we chose GraphQL as the basis for our new Data Connect PostgreSQL product (https://firebase.google.com/products-data-connect) despite acknowledging pretty much all of the issues outlined in this article as correct.
GraphQL is an excellent IDL (interface definition language). It's compact, it's flexible (through directives), and there's literally no better way I'm aware of to rapidly construct complex nested relational queries. But the promise of "clients can fetch whatever they want" adds an enormous burden to backend developers because you have to secure yourself against queries of arbitrary shape and complexity.
In reality you don't want clients to "fetch whatever they want" because clients can't be trusted. The path we took is that developers can predefine the queries that are needed for their client, and then only those queries can be executed from an untrusted client.
This approach provides a surprising number of benefits - you get the flexibility of nested queries and field selection, the end-to-end strongly typed structure of a schema-driven API, and the ability to reason about security like it's a custom backend.
FYI to any readers: Firebase Hosting has nothing to do with the other Firebase stuff. In fact, I personally dislike their live database quite a bit.
If you want to host a simple static site with HTTPS, Firebase Hosting really makes it incredibly easy. My only complaint is that they don't let you view access logs. Here's the official response [0] from the Firebase team as to why that's the case.
Once you have to do anything more complex I think it's better to use a different service. If you don't want to host anything yourself I've heard positive things about Zeit [1], although I haven't personally used it.
[0] https://stackoverflow.com/questions/29669725/can-i-access-w3...
[1] https://zeit.co/
I certainly hope that you don't feel the need to move to something else when your application scales / gets more complex -- our whole mission is to make it so you don't have to. Feel free to reach out to me on Twitter (@mbleigh) if you have specific questions/concerns.