Transcript
When RESTful may be considered harmful
Copyright Push Technology 2015
Ross Garrett
@gssor
We make the Internet work for the mobile-obsessed, app-loving, everything-connected world.
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RESTful may be harmful, eh?
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Yeah…
Here are the Top 10 reasons why RESTful may be considered
harmful
You won’t believe number 7!!
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What do we mean by RESTful?
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Level 2 - HTTP Verbs
http://martinfowler.com/articles/richardsonMaturityModel.html
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An example Level 2 API
http://blog.sgo.to/2014/04/what-your-api-would-look-like-as-webpage.html
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Looking at this as a Web Page
http://blog.sgo.to/2014/04/what-your-api-would-look-like-as-webpage.html
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Looking at this as a Web Page
http://blog.sgo.to/2014/04/what-your-api-would-look-like-as-webpage.html
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Most Web APIs haven’t reached Level 3 – The Glory of REST
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What constitutes “harmful”?
• Poor end-user experience • Insufficient scaling capacity
• Inappropriate implementation / usage
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Poor User Experience
• This usually means slow / unreliable apps
• Often caused by the network
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#1 Data redundancy
{uid:1234567890,title:“Something”,db_key:“some_thing_item”,modified_date:“13-06-1991”,…}
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#1 Data redundancy
{uid:1234567890,title:“Somethingelse”,db_key:“some_thing_item”,modified_date:“06-08-2015”,…}
It’s like the Internet is running with Debug turned on
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Insufficient scaling capability
• Growing from 1000 users to 1,000,000 users
• Should we simply add CPUs, NICs, etc?
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#2 Data delivery
Your clients
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#2 Data delivery
• How many requests do you service for data that hasn’t changed?
• Guess what? HTTP 304 is a thing
• Everything has a cost; only pay for what you need
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Inappropriate Implementation
• REST APIs often mimic backend systems & operations
• If one system needs to notify another about an event - do they really need to exist at the same time?
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#3 Coupling
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#3 Coupling
• Message-driven distributed architectures prove to be much more robust and fault-tolerant.
• Producers and consumers are truly independent.
• Scalability is easier to achieve, and we can distribute messages to multiple systems at a time.
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The Internet…
• Unknown, uncontrolled resource
• It will let you down – Insufficient bandwidth – Inconsistent bandwidth – High latency – Loss of connectivity on a regular basis
• Be sympathetic to realities of the network
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The (mobile) Internet…
• HTTP & TCP slow-start are usually not a good match for constantly dropped connections
• Network interface kills battery
• Large responses + periodic polling = bad
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Solutions?
• Avoid polling!
• Avoid redundancies
• Avoid multiple concurrent HTTP requests
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Think Reactive
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http://www.reactivemanifesto.org
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The right fit
• REST solves particular problems for a particular environment
• Reactive apps almost demand streaming pub/sub messaging – Websockets!
• Conceptual simplicity != best performance
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There is no “one size fits all” approach, think strategically and critically about your architecture
choices
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