Hypermedia APIs – Why, what, how?

High-level view of Hypermedia APIs from a pragmatic viewpoint. Presented at Helsinki Ruby Brigade January 2014 meet-up.

Transcript

1. Hypermedia APIs
   Why, what, how? Vesa Vänskä, Kisko Labs Helsinki Ruby Brigade, Rails Girls
2. Warning!
3. What if all changes of the backend wouldn't require an update to the frontend?
4. Current state is like brittle Selenium tests
5. HyperText is a way to link and access information of various kinds as a web of nodes in which the user can browse at will. — Tim Berners-Lee, 1992
6. URLs in the response aka HATEOAS
7. https://developer.paypal.com/docs/api/#hateoas-links
8. http://37signals.com/svn/posts/3373-getting-hyper- about-hypermedia-apis
9. REST?
10. Increased flexibility
11. Example: Feature needs to be disabled
12. Example: Form fields need to be changed
13. How would you build a Hypermedia API?
14. State machine
15. Following a link changes the state
16. http://whyidentity.blogspot.fi/2013/04/hypermedia- links-in-paypal-restful-apis.html
17. http://www.jayway.com/2012/10/06/why-hypermedia- apis/
18. • Response generators • Clients • Documentation tools Tooling
19. Swagger http://developers.helloreverb.com/swagger/
20. Adoption
21. Books Designing Hypermedia APIs by Steve Klabnik
22. Other resources A Hypermedia API Reading List http://blog.steveklabnik.com/posts/ 2012-02-27-hypermedia-api-reading-list
23. Future ambitions
24. Media-type standardization JSON Schema, HAL, Collection+JSON etc.
25. Unified documentation
26. Thank you! twitter.com/vesan vesavanska.com