It’s really popular to say we’re writing web services, built on top of RESTful APIs, but the reality is what most of us are really doing is writing web applications that make REST calls back to that app’s server for data, not actually calling a generalized web service with multiple sets of users. That’s fine – I use web applications almost all day just like everyone else. Occasionally we need to actually get some data from another team’s data store, and it’s cool, they have an endpoint you can hit and get it. See? Web services with RESTful APIs. The problem is there’s a difference between, “There’s an endpoint that can give us that data” and running a service who’s purpose is to be used by anyone other than the team that wrote it. Continue reading »
Oct 312021