Hypermedia APIs – Why, what, how?

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Hypermedia APIs Why, what, how? Vesa Vänskä, Kisko Labs Helsinki Ruby Brigade, Rails Girls

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Warning!

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

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Current state is like brittle Selenium tests

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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

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URLs in the response aka HATEOAS

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

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

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REST?

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Increased flexibility

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Example: Feature needs to be disabled

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Example: Form fields need to be changed

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How would you build a Hypermedia API?

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State machine

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Following a link changes the state

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

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

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• Response generators • Clients • Documentation tools Tooling

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

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Adoption

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Books Designing Hypermedia APIs by Steve Klabnik

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