This took me a while to figure out, but it’s incredibly powerful once you get it. As others have suggested, I was working on a Redux-based interpreter.
REST allows for clients and servers to evolve independently. If you can constrain that you can probably design something significantly simpler. That’s not a shortcoming of REST, though. The channel between your mobile client and your backend would probably be better served with something more like RPC than academic REST.
That's our proposal/challenge here, come up with a model that tries to merry the best of both world (RPC and REST) but still adheres to HTTP semantics and allow clients/servers to evolve independently.
HATEOAS is designed so clients and servers can evolve independently, like on the open web. If you control both ends, HATEOAS is probably overkill. (And that’s ok.)
The problem isn’t the schema, it’s that you must have exactly one at all times. Sometimes you need zero, sometimes you need many. Having a fixed schema in production reduces unpredictability and provides optimization opportunities. The journey to get to that fixed schema, however, generally benefits from more flexibility.
Or your data is…you know…mark-up. Imagine a biology textbook, or legal contract, with inline citations and entities. There’s lots of marked-up human text around, even if that’s not what you’re sending to a JavaScript front-end. (Ironically, all of our JavaScript front-end frameworks are ultimately building mark-up as documents for human consumption.)
If you control both the client and the server, there are lots of shortcuts you can take. As you say, that’s not the problem that REST was trying to solve, though.
This was nothing but a ring-kissing ceremony only to boost Trump’s own ego. The entire Trump campaign has been a sophomoric revenge fantasy exacted against the (actual) elites who have excluded him his entire life. Trump is not interested in solving problems—that’s hard work without clear benefit to himself. This meeting was a public airing of the fact that he “won” and now those with real economic or social power need to kowtow to him. Having his children there only reinforces this. It would have been refreshing for someone—anyone—to object to Don, Eric, and Ivanka being present.
Argh! They didn’t charge for the component of their offering that was most valuable. Period. Good software doesn’t pay for itself. Consulting and training are difficult to scale, mostly because they require adding people. As such, the margins are minuscule compared to software. “Free” gets you downloads and publicity, but it doesn’t pay the bills. I really liked Rethink’s story and how well they executed things like branding and developer outreach, but without being able to capture the value of what they were producing it’s hard to see how that’s sustainable.
That doesn't mean they can't wrap the word "Enterprise" around a version of their product and sell it at $xxx per license so long as it comes with support. Redhat does this. They can even change to only do consulting on the "Enterprise" version of the software so revenue goes up.
Anyway, the company is wound down and the team has moved on. None of this speculation matters anymore.
Then they need an enterprise sales team to rival MongoDB's. Enterprise software doesn't sell itself - you need an expensive consultative sales process, which itself is a different core competency. A lot of the hate for MongoDB comes from them being a sales-driven company while RethinkDB chose to create an engineering-driven culture.
