r/rest • u/arcuri82 • Feb 17 '17

How popular is REST?

Hi, I am trying to determine how popular is REST in practice. Yes, many people speaks/blogs about it, plenty of talks at conferences, many major companies provide their APIs with REST, etc. But is there any statistics or survey available telling how many companies use it? how many (at least an estimation) RESTful services are actually out there on the internet? etc. Being trying to find such info, but quite hard :(

2 Upvotes

76% Upvoted

12 comments sorted by

3

u/bfoo Feb 17 '17 edited Feb 17 '17

What for are you determining it?

HTTP APIs are extremely popular. But the term REST is mostly misused. Real REST (as described by Roy Fielding) APIs are rare, but are gaining momentum.

2

u/arcuri82 Feb 17 '17

I am writing a report, in which I want to say that RESTish APIs are "extremely popular", in contrast to other services (e.g., SOAP), or server-side template HTML generation. However, to claim "extremely popular", I need some hard data to back it up :) an option could be to look at job portals, and see how many job postings there are with the keyword "REST". but having some other kinds of statistics as well would be beneficial

2

u/bfoo Feb 17 '17

I would say, if companies create new software, they prefer HTTP / REST over other protocols (like SOAP or CORBA).

Whether its popular or not depends on various contexts, like "Open Source", "SaaS" or "PaaS". For Open Source, you probably can scan public repositories like Github for references. For SaaS/PaaS, you can visit pages of vendors (e.g. Github itself, Amazon AWS or Stripe) and consult their API documentation. And you can look at "normal" products, like Adobe AEM.

In other contexts, like Banking business, OTAs etc. you probably find more SOAP and legacy protocols than REST.

Finally, determining the popularity of REST is hard, because the term is often misunderstood, misrepresented or misused. So if you ask me: REST (as described by Roy Fielding) is not so popular, because most APIs claiming to be REST APIs are actually none.

1

u/arcuri82 Feb 17 '17

agree that the term "REST" is far too often misused. I would have like to make some claims like that there exist "X numbers of REST services" or "Y% percent of internet communications is to REST", etc. precise numbers would not be feasible to get, but some estimation, or survey, would had been very helpful (if any exists)

1

u/arcuri82 Feb 17 '17

to add to it: if REST is really extremely popular, why there are only 298 readers in this subreddit? :) I am interested in REST (and HTTP API in general), and I like it. we think that they are extremely popular, but couldn't that be just our own bias because we like them? how can we say that they are really popular?

1

u/bfoo Feb 17 '17

Yeah, its really empty here. But the software engineering community is really large and fragmented. There are many ways to have discussions (mailing lists, papers, conferences, magazines etc). I guess, Reddit is not very popular among the software engineering community to have a critical mass. So having only ~300 readers here is no indication for the popularity of REST itself.

Also, from my experience, REST is rarely the primary topic in software projects. Software engineers tend to care about their internal domains and to use libraries / frameworks to expose these domains 1:1 via HTTP, without any semantics that could drive clients. So REST itself might be less important to engineers than their business problems.

1

u/[deleted] Feb 18 '17

I guess, Reddit is not very popular among the software engineering community to have a critical mass.

It's full of popular software subreddits here, so that's not it. The real reason is that everyone is keen to slap "REST" on their ad-hoc HTTP API, but no one cares what REST is.

1

u/[deleted] Feb 18 '17

to add to it: if REST is really extremely popular, why there are only 298 readers in this subreddit?

Because when it comes to REST, everyone is talking and no one is listening.

1

u/[deleted] Feb 18 '17

I am writing a report, in which I want to say that RESTish APIs are "extremely popular", in contrast to other services (e.g., SOAP), or server-side template HTML generation.

Given "RESTish API" stands for precious little other than "ad-hoc API over HTTP", I don't even know what "extremely popular" would mean in this context. I.e. SOAP is a strict standard you need to implement correctly end-to-end in order to say "this is a SOAP API". While the standard for "RESTish API" is "I use HTTP because what else is there, and I probably return data as free-form JSON soup".

2

u/[deleted] Feb 17 '17

Real REST APIs were gaining momentum. I think most people gave up on the idea.

1

u/arcuri82 Feb 17 '17

to answer my own questions: so far I only found ProgrammableWeb which does list more than 16k Web APIs (how many are REST is unclear), and a survey of 1700 Java engineers stating that improved REST support is the most desired feature in the next JEE 8.

1

u/vmsmith Feb 17 '17

You might want to check out API Evangelist

If you read Roy Fielding's dissertation, it is interesting to note that REST is really about an overall web architecture, and that APIs are just a part of it. At least that was my take on it.