2012-04-23-02-hypermedia-apis.md

Monday Morning Session 1: Designing Hypermedia APIs

Presenter: Steve Klabnik

Slides at https://github.com/steveklabnik/hypermedia-presentation

Searching for the meaning of REST

• Rails REST is not rest
• Writing book on using lean idea ** Put up sign up page see if there was a response

REST is over

• You can't change people's mind by telling them they are wrong
• Nobody knows what REST so let's invent a new buzz word "Hypermedia"

Hypermedia

• Beyond just regular text
• Hypermedia APIs text documents with links to other parts of API

Possitive

• Decoupled
• Salable
• Logevity
• Independent evolution

Downsides

• Latency
• Not as efficient because it's text not binary

Designing with Hypermedia

• Use http properly
• Use hypermedia to guide clients through business process
• Make short term decisions for that hurt us in the long run
• Web is the biggest information store that mankind has been

5 Steps to Hypermedia API design

1. Evaluate Business Process
2. Create State Machine

• dot language

3. Eveluate Media Type needs

• build a format on top of JSON (Collection + JSON, HAL are the popular ones)

4. Create Media Types

• data elements
• how does it link

5. Implement

Links

• Future book: http://designinghypermediaapis.com
• JumpStart Lab Tutorials: http://tutorials.jumpstartlabs.com

Take aways

• Do some learning of state machines and how that affects app/API design
• Openstruct for storing config parameters