Talk:Overview of RESTful API Description Languages

This article was nominated for deletion on 17 August 2015. The result of the discussion was no consensus.

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RESTful API Description Language?

Should the title of this article be RESTful API Description Language? Hugh (talk) 06:34, 11 September 2015 (UTC)[reply]

No, because there's no such thing. Especially not as a proper noun phrase, thus capitalised.

The problem is that these are a subset of IDL (Interface Description Languages), a notable term that should be capitalised. Yet this subset has no objective definition by objective sources. Andy Dingley (talk) 08:43, 11 September 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Ok, how about RESTful API description language? Hugh (talk) 15:31, 11 September 2015 (UTC)[reply]

How do the sources that define this notable set of languages refer to them? Or are there any such sources? Andy Dingley (talk) 16:05, 11 September 2015 (UTC)[reply]

HATEOAS is the key pillar of a RESTful API, not an "alternative"

"An alternative approach to building RESTful APIs is known under the acronym HATEOAS..."

Alternative? A world of no, it is key:

The definitive source:

http://www.ics.uci.edu/~fielding/pubs/dissertation/rest_arch_style.htm#sec_5_2

http://roy.gbiv.com/untangled/2008/rest-apis-must-be-hypertext-driven

Yes, I know when people use the term "REST API" in colloquial conversation they often ignore this, c'est la vie, but in an article that purports to define things, the definitions should be try to be correct, and not purposefully misleading....

I'm not suggesting that we change the name of the article, but I am suggesting that, if we're going to have a section on HATEOAS, we point out that this is an area where theory and reality often contradict, that "RESTful" IDL's often go against the original spirit of REST (but not necessarily), and not stoop to misdirection and spin. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 173.241.250.232 (talk) 18:01, 18 October 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Article needs cleanup or deletion

As noted by Andy Dingley, this article suffers from WP:LISTCRUFT, and in general, is poorly written.

As an example, § List of Restful API DLs would be better written as tabular data instead of list data, and I'm fairly certain that TvojaStara attempted to link his own repository in an edit to this article on 4 November 2015 (which, as an aside, points to a stale/inactive repository that hasn't been updated since 2017, and the site linked there doesn't even have a domain name record in any DNS server I've looked up). Echohawkdown (talk) 07:13, 1 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Removed non-REST IDLs

As the article is about REST, I removed the IDLs I know cannot represent state transfer links. I'm almost certain Google Endpoints cannot either and I'm doubtful about Avro.

The WSDL spec references REST but has examples of pre-known URLs and zero example of state transfer links. Nowhere man (talk) 11:42, 27 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]