Timeless

Ah, destructuring is so sweet!

You're right, it's no real need for it and it's unfeasible because you need to either (a) fully static type analyze everything or (b) what anonymous just explained... and they're both out of the question.

The refinements thing was a joke, in the spirit of what else can one add: it's a controlled form of monkeypatching / classboxing about which a lot of fuss was made in the Ruby community after Matz decided to add it to the language (http://timelessrepo.com/refinements-in-ruby), mainly because it's very hard to implement without creating more problems, even if you have your own interpreter to hack on (short answer: don't bother looking about it and even if you're smart enough to figure out a way to add it to a compile-to-JS language, don't waste your effort on it - they're not an anti-feature and they could make sense in languages that allow monkeypatching, like JS and Ruby, but they're too much work for too little benefit and too much possibility for bad use and unneeded complexity).

I really wish we had a JSON 2 format which could fix JSON's obvious shortcomings. I would like to see:

- Support for Maps and Sets (unlike objects, maps allow arbitrary types to be used as keys)

- A standard Date format

- Embedded binary blobs. No idea how to do this and keep it human readable, but when you need this its super useful. Maybe something similar to WS's binary message encoding.

- Arbitrary precision integer support. This is particularly useful for cryptocurrencies and for interoperability with 64 bit integers in other languages. And bigints are coming to javascript - https://github.com/tc39/proposal-bigint

- Maybe even fix JSON's weird unicode encoding: http://timelessrepo.com/json-isnt-a-javascript-subset

Unfortunately it seems like nobody 'owns' JSON enough to give JSON 2.0 the political weight it would need for cross-language support.

> Insisting that a URL change with state is taking it too far. It's not how I understood what Tim Berners-Lee and others were saying at the beginning. I would be interested, however, in articles that espouse this.

I'm referring to HATEOAS, the final and most demanding "stage" of RESTful API design: http://timelessrepo.com/haters-gonna-hateoas

> A better rule is one URL per "document" or "record." So in your Photoshop example, there would be a different URL per file that you edit (www.photoshop.com/image001.psd) but not per edit. Well, if the app saved versions, then you could append ?v=203. But in general I think it's enough to align URLs to "documents" (like a news story) or "records" (like a particular profile in a contact database).

This sounds like a good idea.

It's really worth reading the thesis that started it all (http://www.ics.uci.edu/~fielding/pubs/dissertation/top.htm) and I also find this HATEOAS article (http://timelessrepo.com/haters-gonna-hateoas) worthwhile reading, but to answer your question succinctly, here's my short definition:

"REST is inter-computer communication structured such that the server doesn't maintain any client state so that neither the duration between requests nor the number of clients impacts the resource usage of the server."

It's not quite true, but the architecture has benefits:

1) No need to replicate client sessions in a clustered environment.

2) There's no impact if a client wait hours between requests.

3) Every resource a client uses has a unique location on the network.

http://timelessrepo.com/haters-gonna-hateoas#hateoas

It shows in the example:

<entry>
<id>1337</id>
<author>Steve Klabnik</author>
<link rel = "/linkrels/entry/newcomment"
uri = "/entries/1337/comments" />
<link rel = "self"
uri = "/entries/1337" />
</entry>

But I would go further and suggest that whether to show those shouldn't just be based on what the API can do, but what the client (and perhaps user controlling the client) can do.

As in... if they can read but not create, then show the "self" link but not the "newcomment" link.

Thus we're not just saying "our API has these endpoints", we're saying "you can do this".

JSON is not actually strictly a subset of JavaScript, surprisingly. Although, in practice, it doesn't really matter, because you wouldn't want to blindly eval JSON data, anyway.

I mention this not to be pedantic, but in case it helps another coder from wasting a couple days chasing a bug like I once had to, when I thought I could template raw JSON into a script file to make some server-side data available as a global var on in the browser.

http://timelessrepo.com/json-isnt-a-javascript-subset