Stop Writing REST API Clients

Re:Stop Writing REST API Clients by robbles on Sunday February 24, 2013 @02:39PM (#5275575)

Can you give an example of an acceptable implementation of a HATEOAS REST API (wow, that's a lot of letters) with an associated client that actually uses it?

My experience has been that you can't communicate much through HATEOAS that's actually beneficial to a human programmer writing a client. Sure, you can add all the hypermedia links you want in your API responses, but how does that make writing a client easier? Wouldn't it just be helpful to crawlers?

Not trying to put down the idea - I want to believe, but I just haven't seen any obvious examples using it in the real world yet.

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Re:Stop Writing REST API Clients by steveklabnik on Sunday February 24, 2013 @03:23PM (#5275745)

> (wow, that's a lot of letters)

We're all calling these "hypermedia APIs" these days.

> with an associated client that actually uses it?

I have written a toy client here: https://gist.github.com/steveklabnik/2187514

You can run it against this site, written in node: http://alps-microblog.herokuapp.com/

Or this site, written in Rails: https://rstat.us/

It (should, I haven't tried it in a long while) work with both just fine. They both use the ALPS microblogging spec. yay generic clients!

As for people who have 'more real' ones: GitHub, Twilio (partially, more in the future), Balanced Payments (YC W11, iirc), Comcast (though that's internal :() Netflix has aspects, FoxyCart.

This year will be the year of examples.

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Re:Stop Writing REST API Clients by robbles on Sunday February 24, 2013 @08:30PM (#5276813)

Interesting. I didn't realize that there were specs like ALPS for defining how to implement this kind of thing. Isn't it still a little difficult to do this for APIs that don't neatly fit into some kind of generic profile (e.g. microblogging)?

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Re:Stop Writing REST API Clients by steveklabnik on Sunday February 24, 2013 @09:08PM (#5276912)

There's a few different ways to go about things, but every app has some kind of domain. If you're the first, then you can define how it works. :)

Mike Amundsen's terribly named but amazingly well written 'Building Hypermedia APIs in HTML5 and Node' is a really thorough examination of this topic.

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