Exactly. The problem is that, for some reason, people decided that an &quot;API&quot; should be &quot;RESTful&quot;. Ruby on Rails put this idea into a lot of developers&#x27; heads.<p>An API is probably the worst thing to try to make truly RESTful, in the full HATEOAS sense.<p>Further confusion comes from the fact that some of the REST constraints are actually very useful in machine-to-machine API design. Thinking about a system in terms of a large number of resources operated on by a standard set of verbs is nice. Caching is nice. The un-bloating of HTTP bodies from the SOAP days is nice.<p>I think there is some consensus that we can call that thing an &quot;HTTP API&quot; rather than a &quot;REST API&quot;, which might start to clear up some of the confusion.