Problems with RESTful APIs (2015)
When I was given the task of defining how our multi-robot server would interface with our user interfaces, I eventually settled on REST. Most of what I knew about REST had been obtained that week.  I implemented something pretty vanilla with Django and it all felt pretty elegant. I didn't have to worry about defining a protocol, there was pretty much already one for me:<p>- GET, PUT, POST, DELETE (I learned there were others but were kind of niche/obsolete)<p>- 200s for success, 400s for client (request) error, 500s for server error.<p>It was all nice and worked great (and still does, years later).<p>But over time numerous people started told me that no it's actually all wrong for one reason or another.  I've heard that I should never use anything except GET and POST.  That I should <i>ALWAYS</i> return a 200 and provide error metadata as a response if there actually was an error. That POST is actually meant for updates and PUT is meant for new entities. That the opposite is true. That neither is true and I should <i>always</i> use POST for any mutation of state. etc.<p>I feel like I had success because I approached it from a position of ignorance, meaning I just implemented a simple, sane REST API and was none the wiser that I was doing it wrong.