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Facebook Relay: An Evil And/Or Incompetent Attack on REST

9 pointsby inakiabtover 9 years ago

2 comments

smt88over 9 years ago
&gt; <i>If you only want a subset of that graph, make an endpoint around that subset.</i><p>This is one of the places this article didn&#x27;t ring true for me. GraphQL is a much simpler way to do this. I shouldn&#x27;t have to make a new endpoint every time my frontend team adds a new screen or modal.<p>&gt; <i>Facebook is just Facebook. It&#x27;s just another web company, making a ton of money off fundamental backbone technologies which it barely understands.</i><p>Like Google, Facebook is so large that it can redefine web technology. After all, the web is built upon agreed-upon standards. If enough of the web (and, yes, it can be just a few companies) agree on a standard, then that&#x27;s what the web becomes.<p>And Facebook could very well be managing the most complicated internet-connected infrastructure on the planet. My mind is routinely boggled by the fact that Facebook loads as quickly as it does.<p>&gt; <i>You can answer every complaint Facebook has with &quot;just use REST correctly.&quot;</i><p>Even if I use REST correctly (which I do for some reason), what benefit does that give me? My users probably won&#x27;t. It adds headaches for me.<p>I recently wrote a compliant REST API, and our app developer told me that one of his libraries wasn&#x27;t making non-POST requests properly and that I should allow all requests to be POST. What am I supposed to do about that? I couldn&#x27;t rewrite a library for a platform I don&#x27;t understand, and it was too late to fire him. I just broke the REST compliance of my API and moved on with my life.<p>The bottom line is that REST is too poorly understood and poorly adopted to offer me much benefit in terms of efficiency. Ever used a REST client library? It requires tons of configuration to tell it how the API you&#x27;re consuming is non-compliant. It hardly saves time at all.
mpweiherover 9 years ago
My guess would be incompetent. Just like react.native was billed as &quot;fixing&quot; problems with MVC, when what it offers is <i>exactly</i> MVC.