When RESTful may be considered harmful

When RESTful may be considered harmful

Copyright Push Technology 2015

Ross Garrett

@gssor

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RESTful may be harmful, eh?


Yeah…

Here are the Top 10 reasons why RESTful may be considered

harmful

You won’t believe number 7!!

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What do we mean by RESTful?

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Level 2 - HTTP Verbs

http://martinfowler.com/articles/richardsonMaturityModel.html


An example Level 2 API

http://blog.sgo.to/2014/04/what-your-api-would-look-like-as-webpage.html


Looking at this as a Web Page



Looking at this as a Web Page



Most Web APIs haven’t reached Level 3 – The Glory of REST

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What constitutes “harmful”?

•  Poor end-user experience •  Insufficient scaling capacity

•  Inappropriate implementation / usage


Poor User Experience

• This usually means slow / unreliable apps

• Often caused by the network

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#1 Data redundancy

{uid:1234567890,title:“Something”,db_key:“some_thing_item”,modified_date:“13-06-1991”,…}


#1 Data redundancy

{uid:1234567890,title:“Somethingelse”,db_key:“some_thing_item”,modified_date:“06-08-2015”,…}

It’s like the Internet is running with Debug turned on


Insufficient scaling capability

• Growing from 1000 users to 1,000,000 users

• Should we simply add CPUs, NICs, etc?

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#2 Data delivery

Your clients


#2 Data delivery

•  How many requests do you service for data that hasn’t changed?

•  Guess what? HTTP 304 is a thing

•  Everything has a cost; only pay for what you need


Inappropriate Implementation

•  REST APIs often mimic backend systems & operations

•  If one system needs to notify another about an event - do they really need to exist at the same time?

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#3 Coupling

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#3 Coupling

•  Message-driven distributed architectures prove to be much more robust and fault-tolerant.

•  Producers and consumers are truly independent.

•  Scalability is easier to achieve, and we can distribute messages to multiple systems at a time.



The Internet…

•  Unknown, uncontrolled resource

•  It will let you down –  Insufficient bandwidth –  Inconsistent bandwidth –  High latency –  Loss of connectivity on a regular basis

•  Be sympathetic to realities of the network


The (mobile) Internet…

•  HTTP & TCP slow-start are usually not a good match for constantly dropped connections

•  Network interface kills battery

•  Large responses + periodic polling = bad


Solutions?

•  Avoid polling!

•  Avoid redundancies

•  Avoid multiple concurrent HTTP requests


Think Reactive

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http://www.reactivemanifesto.org


The right fit

•  REST solves particular problems for a particular environment

•  Reactive apps almost demand streaming pub/sub messaging –  Websockets!

•  Conceptual simplicity != best performance


There is no “one size fits all” approach, think strategically and critically about your architecture

choices

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When RESTful may be considered harmful