Roy Fielding's Misappropriated REST Dissertation (2020)
Back in the day, I was on a yahoo group that had the REST evangelists pushing for how REST maps much better to consumable APIs than the enterprise nonsense that SOAP/WSDL/WS-* and all that created.<p>The SOAP people disagreed because they wanted everything defined up front between parties, <i>out of band</i> and then the enterprise companies started selling "tooling" to over-engineer and "manage" this nonsense.<p>Soon there was "governance" introduced so that centralized control of APIs could be configured and managed. Of course, the different implementations couldn't interoperate, so there was classic "supplier lockin" to your chosen Enterprise-Ready WS-* infrastructure (tm). WS-Addressing introduced resource addressing over XML over HTTP that overloaded the equivalent of a URL. Just one example.<p>REST in general (HTML/JS/HTTP in particular) has proven to be scalable, understandable, and implementable, without all the associated nonsense that WS-* dragged in.<p>Want encryption in transit? TLS provides that.<p>Want caching of results on either client or server or intermediate? HTTP Etags and headers provide that.<p>About the only thing that REST over HTTP doesn't provide is sessions, but JWTs and OAuth now handle most of that.