REST's Relevance in Modern API Design

In 2000, Roy Fielding’s doctoral dissertation introduced REST as a set of architectural constraints for distributed systems, fundamentally changing how we think about web APIs. But many years later, does REST still deserve its throne as the dominant API paradigm?

This talk revisits Fielding’s original vision—not the simplified “HTTP + JSON = REST” that most developers know, but the full architectural style with hypermedia controls, stateless interactions, and uniform interfaces. We’ll examine which REST constraints have stood the test of time (statelessness wins everywhere) and which have been largely ignored (when did you last implement HATEOAS?).

Through case studies we’ll evaluate where REST excels, where it falls short, and whether the principles that made it revolutionary are still the principles we need for building distributed systems in the modern era.

• Design
• Architecture