Roy Fielding Would Like a Word About Your "REST API" In October 2008, Roy Fielding — the person who literally invented REST in a year 2000 PhD dissertation, the same person who co-authored HTTP — opened a blog post with this sentence: I am getting frustrated by the number of people calling any HTTP-based interface a REST API. He then proceeded, over about a thousand words, to roast the entire industry for calling things REST that were not, in fact, REST. The line that everyone still quotes, eighteen years later: That is RPC. It screams RPC. There is so much coupling on display that it should be given an X rating. Reader, I have built dozens of APIs in my career that I called REST APIs, that were not REST APIs by Fielding's definition. You probably have too. Almost every "REST API" you have ever used is, by the inventor's own standard, not REST.…