Disclaimer... Getting on my SOAPbox...
Those that know me well know that - in certain areas like technology - I pay close attention to detail. Some of my closest friends have even gone as far as calling me borderline obsessive when it comes to paying close attention to detail. This certainly doesn't extend to other areas (you'll probably find spelling or grammatical errors in this blog post, for instance), but one that has really annoyed me lately is the loose use of the term 'REST' by many in the industry.
REST, or Representational State Transfer is an architecture and characterizes behavior, specifically that clients and servers exchange requests based on the representation of an object, typically its current state. In terms of cloud storage, REST generally means PUTting or GETting the latest copy of an object based on some supplied metadata and in its simplest form is nothing more than a query on top of HTTP.
But some, when discussing how cloud storage is accessed, say "cloud storage is accessed using REST".
Hence my post. REST is NOT a protocol. It is an architecture and a behavior. HTTP is a protocol, and the way it is typically used with cloud storage conforms to REST as an architecture and a behavior, thus the interface used for accessing cloud storage is RESTful. But, the protocol is still HTTP.
The correct way to say this would be "cloud storage is accessed using a RESTful HTTP-based interface (or API for that matter)".
Off my SOAPbox (ha) and on to breakfast. Have a wonderful day everyone.
Helpful for someone like me that knows what time it is but not how the watch works. I will do my best not to mis use REST going forward. Thanks.
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