[dinoreic]

REST is for noobs, JSON RPC is silent pro's choice :)

Make all requests POST and enjoy easy life without useless debates on should creation of resource be on POST or PUT or should you return HTTP status 404 or 200 if resource/document on server is not found (of course if should be 200 because request was a success, 404 should only be used it api method is not found).

I 100% agree with Troy Griffitts beautiful take https://vmrcre.org/web/scribe/home/-/blogs/why-rest-sucks

[atsjie]

JSON RPC:

- Everything is a POST, so normal HTTP caching is out of the question.

- JSON RPC code generators are non-existent or badly maintained depending on the language. Same with doc generators.

- Batching is redundant with HTTP2, just complicates things.

- Because everything is a POST normal logging isn't effective (i.e. see the url in logs, easy to filter etc). You'll have to write something yourself.

- Not binary like Protobufs or similar

But yeah, "the silent pro's choice"... Let's keep it silent.

JSON RPC is pretty much dead at this point and superseded by better alternatives if you're designing an RPC service.

[klabb3]

> - JSON RPC code generators are non-existent or badly maintained depending on the language.

Very much so. It’s in a terrible state where I’ve looked. Most of the tooling is by OpenAPI or similar which comes with a bloatload of crap that is only marginally better than say SOAP. It needs to be much simpler.

> - Not binary like Protobufs or similar

Agreed. This is not an issue for small things that can be base64 encoded but once you need large blob transfers you don’t have any reasonable option. This is a problem in eg graphql which also misses the mark and you have to step outside for things like file uploads.

It feels like the whole standardization effort around json rpc is weak. It doesn’t address the needs of modern RPC-like systems. Which is unfortunate because there’s a real opportunity to improve upon the chaos of REST.

[Freedom2]

Thanks for this. I felt I was going crazy, decrying many professional and smart engineers work as not being 'expert' enough, as if they didn't weigh up and consider other options. Yes, there can be a bit of cargo culting, but to claim that only experts use JSON RPC is ridiculous.

[MuffinFlavored]

i always fail to understand what kind of services there are that aren’t at least RPC-ish

thin CRUD wrappers obviously but usually when you are piping data from one source/format to another, you typically want to do something that is ever so slightly “not-CRUD” (call another API/service, etc.)

[pixelatedindex]

Noob question, why is batching redundant in HTTP2?

[cle]

I don't like REST either, but JSON RPC is similarly hamstrung in some scenarios (examples: streaming, CDN caching, binary encoding).

I mostly dislike REST because nobody can agree on what it is and there are too many zealots who love to bikeshed. If you stick with the simple parts of REST and ignore the zealots, it's decent enough for many scenarios.

I've yet to find an RPC protocol that fills all requirements I've encountered, they all have tradeoffs and at this point you're better off learning the tradeoffs and how to deal with them (REST, JSON RPC, gRPC, WebSockets, etc.) and how they interact with their transports (HTTP/1.1, H2, QUIC, etc.), and then play the unfortunate game of balancing tradeoffs.

[nine_k]

ReST makes sense in certain cases, where resources are a tree (like a typical web site is a tree), with collections of leaves, and these leaves make sense by themselves. Then you can go full HATEOAS and reap some actual benefits from that.

Most of the time (like 99.9%) what you happen to need is JSON RPC. Even if some parts of your API surface look like they would fit the ReST model, the bulk does not. Ignore that, build a protocol along the lines of your subject area. Always return 200 if your server did not fail or reject the request, use internal status signaling for details. Limit yourself to GET and POST. Use HTTP as a mere transport.

[robertlagrant]

These seem arbitrary rules.

"Use internal status signaling" for example doesn't seem any better than deciding what status codes mean what; it's just a second layer of codes where the first one is now useless.

"Limit yourself to GET and POST." - delete and patch are pretty useful for documentation simplicity too. If there were a LIST verb that would be even handier, but nothing's perfect.

"build a protocol along the lines of your subject area" - I think you can do this (and well or badly) using REST or RPC forms.

[eikenberry]

+1 and I'll bump it up a notch... not only should you ignore REST you should ignore URLs. You want to write protocols, not APIs. Redis, for example, has a better "API" than any web API I've used. Easy to use, easy to wrap, easy to extend and version. HTTP is the other obvious example that I shouldn't have to go into.

If you'd like a good back and forth on the idea the classic c2 page is a great resource. http://wiki.c2.com/?ApiVsProtocol

[nine_k]

Don't ignore URLs completely! They are great for namespacing and versioning.

[lenkite]

Ahh, the 2000's called. They want their SOAP back.

[paulddraper]

I don't think the parent was referring to an XML-based protocol.

[kiitos]

This article defines REST incorrectly, and doesn't seem to understand the concept of HTTP methods, calling them verbs (arguably fine) and types (huh?) seemingly arbitrarily. Methods are a core part of HTTP -- just because you can't specify them explicitly in a browser as a user doesn't mean they're "cryptic curl arguments" or worth ignoring. I'm not sure I'd put too much stock into this perspective.

[dinoreic]

Thank you all for the great comments.

I want to emphasize that I was not thinking about JSON RPC as a specific protocol, but more as a JSON format to transfer data, similar to how REST APIs usually do, and some kind of "HTTP method agnostic remote procedure call", it does not have to be JSON RPC standard.

Personally, I am a fan of just having API Class-es + methods that automatically map to API calls with automatic api interface and doc builders. I find that it would be super strange if I had to prefix my internal methods with DELETE or PUT based on do they remove or add to some Array. Using that logic, why do that in APIs.

I just find it super strange that people want to mirror their app logic + error response codes to some protocol like HTTP – ridiculous :) Why not go even lower as TCP and use some of that spec for our client <> server API conn. Many people will laugh, but if you think about it, where is the difference?

[beachy]

> I find that it would be super strange if I had to prefix my internal methods with DELETE or PUT based on do they remove or add to some Array. Using that logic, why do that in APIs.

It's true that POST ends up being a bit of a grab bag for all the non-CRUD API calls.

But I find it very useful when looking over someonje's API to find them using PUT, or DELETE. PUT in particular provides really useful signals about the nature of the resource we are dealing with.

And lets not get started with the in-built caching etc. you throw away by not using GET.

[kiitos]

> I just find it super strange that people want to mirror their app logic + error response codes to some protocol like HTTP – ridiculous :)

Why is this ridiculous?

HTTP is the default protocol for network services, so it seems to me that it is perfectly sensible to design your API to be compatible with HTTP semantics.

> Why not go even lower as TCP and use some of that spec for our client <> server API conn. Many people will laugh, but if you think about it, where is the difference?

Because HTTP is the only protocol that can reliably transit arbitrary networks (middle-boxes, NAT, etc.) in practice.

[parentheses]

REST conventions only make sense for externally consumed APIs. Even for those, there's GraphQL.

[kiitos]

The Venn diagram overlap between REST and GraphQL is pretty small.

[lprd]

I've been a REST API developer for a few years now. For whatever reason, I've never bothered dipping my toes in the RPC realm. This article resonated with me. Looks like I'll be building an RPC API in the near future.