Ready?

I really like a lot of things Mr. Nolen has done and really enjoy most of his talks and posts. I was less enthused with this one. I think my main hang up was his mis-representation of REST and resources. I get the feeling he equates resources with data stores. If you watched the video and then skimmed that Wikipedia page, you will quickly see that the notion of “joining” two resources is nonsensical. I think Mr. Nolen is really referring to that “pragmatic” definition that means POX + HTTP methods, which really would correlate well to data stores.

Real REST drives application state, so you would not need to join to anything else if using REST. His criticism of performance also misses the mark, for if you are using REST then you should also be carefully planning out and leveraging a caching strategy. REST isn’t appropriate for every application, but not for the reasons Mr. Nolen so casually dismisses it. Think about it this way: if REST is not suitable for performance or mobile devices, then you must also agree that all websites (not apps, just sites like Amazon.com) fail on mobile devices. That’s just absurd.

I can’t imagine anyone is surprised when Mr. Nolen mentions SQL. He’s just mentioned joins, and what else would a developer associate with that term? If you have hung around the web long enough, you may have heard of SPARQL, which is a query language for linked data. Linked Data and SPARQL never seem to have caught on, but they address at least part of the problem Mr. Nolen presents. A big part of Linked Data’s failing is lack of tooling and painful implementation (mostly related to RDF). Perhaps new tools like BrightstarDB will help turn things around.

Interestingly, Mr. Nolen’s solution, SQL, is strong at ad hoc querying but not so great at scalability. If the web, linked data, etc. were already addressed by SQL, then those technologies would not exist. I really don’t get the need for mis-representation and indirection here. (On a related note, Fabian Pascal recently posted on the “Conflation & Logical-Physical Confusion” surrounding mis-representing SQL as the relational model, which ties in well to this post.)

The only thing presented here is an alternative to REST where the client specifies dependencies for the server to fulfill. This is a flip of the REST style where the server drives application state and provides contracts via media types to a client-driven approach. This is a perfectly valid approach, and interestingly one where Linked Data could excel. Tools such as Datomic, GraphQL + Relay, and Falcor certainly look interesting and appear to work well for very large projects.

I have no doubt that any of these techniques, done well, provides excellent results. Tooling will likely determine the winner, for better or worse.