When REST isn't good enough

When REST isn't good enough:

At Braintree, we receive nearly 1.5 million API calls per day from thousands of our customers. Instead of a public REST API, we provide client libraries in seven languages to ease integration with our gateway. This covers almost every modern web application language. Using our Java library, we can also reach other JVM languages like Clojure and Scala. As you can imagine, these libraries are built on top of a REST API. Occasionally we are asked why we don't document and expose the REST API, and this inevitably sparks a discussion on our team about the tradeoffs. During these discussions there are three topics that often come up: Security, Platform Support, and Backwards Compatibility. These three topics have kept us in favor of providing client libraries instead of direct access to the low level API.