It also means they made some effort to use appropriate http verbs instead of GET/POST for everything, and they made an effort to organize their urls into patterns like `/things/:id/child/:child_id`.
It was probably an organic response to the complexity of SOAP/WSDL at the time, so people harping on how it's not HATEOAS kinda miss the historical context; people didn't want another WSDL.
>> /things/:id/child/:child_id
It seems that nesting isn't super common in my experience. Maybe two levels if completely composite but they tend to be fairly flat.
> instead of GET/POST for everything
Sometimes that's a pragmatic choice too. I've worked with HTTP clients that only supported GET and POST. It's been a while but not that long ago.
> It also means they made some effort to use appropriate http verbs instead of GET/POST for everything, and they made an effort to organize their urls into patterns like `/things/:id`.
No not really. A lot of people don't understand REST to be anything other than JSON over HTTP. Sometimes, the HTTP verbs thing is done as part of CRUD but actually CRUD doesn't necessarily have to do with the HTTP verbs at all and there can just be different endpoints for each operation. It's a whole mess.