You Give ReST a Bad Name

Music: "You Give Love a Bad Name" by Bon Jovi / © Jon Bon Jovi, Richie Sambora, Desmond Child

You know how it is… you’re lured in. Seduced, even. You’ve been hurt before, but this time it’ll be different. You’re older, wiser, you’re not going to fall for their lies…

Nope, it’s not a song about love. It’s about integrating with vendors who are absolutely insistent that the project will be easy, because they have a ReST API.

Basically the line ‘you promised me JSON then sent XML’ popped into my head one day and the song just sort of grew from there.

Lyrics

This integration is going to hell,
You promised me JSON, then sent XML,
You say it works in a ReSTful way,
Then your errors come back as 200 OK

Whoa, it’s no surprise,
Method names in URIs,
Your data won’t even deserialize

CHORUS:

Your API is a hall of shame,
You give ReST a bad name,
It falls apart, and we take the blame,
You give ReST a bad name
You give ReST… a bad name

Broken methods, missing docs,
Updates fail ‘cos of database locks,
Breaking changes, every time,
Your every release takes our system offline

Whoa, it’s no surprise,
Method names in URIs,
Your data won’t even deserialize

CHORUS