I agree that most people just use REST as a buzzword today but don&#x27;t really know what it is.<p>As I remember REST was popularized by Rails a few years back.  If you go back and look at the railsconf talk by Hansson in 2006 you can see that the Rails people just wanted something that handled CRUD operations. However, one of the drivers behind REST was to provide web services for machine to machine communication - something that was traditionally done by WSDL files in SOAP. The Rails people didn&#x27;t really have much of a need for HATEOAS, because they were not interested in replacing WSDL files. Primarily they wanted to get away from the 800 pound gorilla that was SOAP services (that back in 2005 was what every Enterprise Java web app was doing). As a result the focus was primarily on PUT&#x2F;GET&#x2F;POST&#x2F;DELETE.<p>I&#x27;ve seen a lot of &quot;REST&quot; API&#x27;s that are actually HTTP&#x2F;RPC API&#x27;s or quasi-REST API&#x27;s that mix REST for simple things, but then begin exposing RPC calls as the developers ability to manage complexity breaks down.  I&#x27;ve never seen anyone actually using HATEOAS yet (maybe i&#x27;ve been isolated??)<p>Usually when your boss says &quot;And it has to have a REST API!!&quot; That means that 1. It must use the internet, 2. It must return JSON, 3. It uses URLs to do things.  Basically if the above is true it&#x27;s a RESTful API. I think that most developers actually believe that are making a REST API even when they are not - simply because they don&#x27;t really know.<p>Your right about being the new XML buzzword though. 10 years ago if you did web services having WSDL, XSTL, SOAP and XML on a resume meant you were the shiz. Today you have REST and AngularJS on your resume if you do web development. Meh :0