Rest

Detailed comparison covering rest vs graphql vs grpc: the 2026 comparison: architecture differences, performance benchmarks, ecosystem maturity, when to use each, and the 2026 verdict.

The ten recurring REST mistakes ranked by impact: returning 200 OK for errors (breaks every gateway's status-code contract), verbs in URLs (POST /api/createUser instead of POST /v1/users), inconsistent error shapes, exposed auto-increment database IDs, missing or wrong pagination, missing Idempotency-Key headers on POST (causing double-charges), ignoring HTTP semantics like 201 Created with Location, unvalidated input, broken authentication, and missing versioning. Stripe's error envelope {error: {type, code, message, param}} is the de facto standard. A Series B company spent $2M on a v2 rewrite after two years of accumulated inconsistency. The fix order is: pick the highest-impact mistake, fix it across the API in one sprint, lint it in CI, then repeat.