Designing Hypermedia APIs
summary
Argues that APIs should use HTTP properly and add hypermedia controls to guide clients; gives five concrete steps: map business processes to a state machine, design media types (example: application/vnd.w3c_love.validation+json), implement links and forms, and wire the server. Shows a Shoes desktop client that follows returned link/forms to crawl a site and display validator results — it works as demonstrated. Notes tradeoffs (higher latency, cache complexity) and tooling options like Collection+JSON or HAL.
AI-written summary · about
chapters (12)
- 0:00Introduction
- 1:52The rest journey
- 4:38Rethinking REST
- 7:04Hypermedia explained
- 10:59API longevity and evolution
- 15:24Two rules for hypermedia
- 17:07Five steps to building
- 18:37Concrete example
- 23:37Designing media types
- 30:19Implementation details
- 33:45Client side demonstration
- 38:34Conclusion
