What is the advantage of using REST instead of non

Question

Apparently, REST is just a set of conventions about how to use HTTP. I wonder which advantage these conventions provide. Does anyone know?

Answer 1

I recommend taking a look at Ryan Tomayko's How I Explained REST to My Wife

Third party edit

Excerpt from the waybackmaschine link:

How about an example. You’re a teacher and want to manage students:

• what classes they’re in,
• what grades they’re getting,
• emergency contacts,
• information about the books you teach out of, etc.

If the systems are web-based, then there’s probably a URL for each of the nouns involved here: student, teacher, class, book, room, etc. ... If there were a machine readable representation for each URL, then it would be trivial to latch new tools onto the system because all of that information would be consumable in a standard way. ... you could build a country-wide system that was able to talk to each of the individual school systems to collect testing scores.

Each of the systems would get information from each other using a simple HTTP GET. If one system needs to add something to another system, it would use an HTTP POST. If a system wants to update something in another system, it uses an HTTP PUT. The only thing left to figure out is what the data should look like.

Answer 2

@Timmmm, about your edit :

GET /timeline_posts     // could return the N first posts, with links to fetch the next/previous N posts

This would dramatically reduce the number of calls

And nothing prevents you from designing a server that accepts HTTP parameters to denote the field values your clients may want...

But this is a detail.

Much more important is the fact that you did not mention huge advantages of the REST architectural style (much better scalability, due to server statelessness; much better availability, due to server statelessness also; much better use of the standard services, such as caching for instance, when using a REST architectural style; much lower coupling between client and server, due to the use of a uniform interface; etc. etc.)

As for your remark

"Not all actions easily map to CRUD (create, read/retrieve, update, delete)."

: an RDBMS uses a CRUD approach, too (SELECT/INSERT/DELETE/UPDATE), and there is always a way to represent and act upon a data model.

Regarding your sentence

"You may not even be dealing with object type resources"

: a RESTful design is, by essence, a simple design - but this does NOT mean that designing it is simple. Do you see the difference ? You'll have to think a lot about the concepts your application will represent and handle, what must be done by it, if you prefer, in order to represent this by means of resources. But if you do so, you will end up with a more simple and efficient design.