Stop using REST for state synchronization (2024)

Stop using REST for state synchronization tl;dr: Most apps need state synchronization, not state transfer. We should replace REST and friends with proper state synchronization protocols where appropriate. Apart from getting into van life in Europe and working on the Eqlog Datalog engine, I’ve also spent some time of my sabbatical building various webapps. The tech stack I used was React + Typescript for the frontend and a REST server implemented with Rust and the Axum library as backend. Rust might be somewhat unusual, but I think otherwise this is a very typical setup. What struck me is how incredibly cumbersome, repetitive and brittle this programming model is, and I think much of this is due to using REST as interface between the client and the server. REST is a state transfer protocol, but we usually want to synchronize a piece of state between the client and the server. This mismatch means that we usually implement ad-hoc state synchronization on top of REST, and it turns out t ... Read full article.