Hypermedia APIs Why, what, how?

Vesa Vänskä, Kisko Labs Helsinki Ruby Brigade, Rails Girls

Warning!

What if all changes of the backend wouldn't require an update to

the frontend?

Current state is like brittle Selenium tests

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

URLs in the response aka

HATEOAS

https://developer.paypal.com/docs/api/#hateoas-links

http://37signals.com/svn/posts/3373-getting-hyper-about-hypermedia-apis

REST?

Increased flexibility

Example: Feature needs to be

disabled

Example: Form fields need to be

changed

How would you build a

Hypermedia API?

State machine

Following a link changes the state

http://whyidentity.blogspot.fi/2013/04/hypermedia-links-in-paypal-restful-apis.html

http://www.jayway.com/2012/10/06/why-hypermedia-apis/

• Response generators

• Clients

• Documentation tools

Tooling

Swagger http://developers.helloreverb.com/swagger/

Adoption

Books

Designing Hypermedia APIs by Steve Klabnik

Other resources

A Hypermedia API Reading List http://blog.steveklabnik.com/posts/2012-02-27-hypermedia-api-reading-list

Future ambitions

Media-type standardization

JSON Schema, HAL, Collection+JSON etc.

Unified documentation

Thank you!twitter.com/vesan

vesavanska.com