How do we get people who don't give a shit about hypermedia to adopt it

Convener

Darrel Miller (@darrel_miller)

Attendees

@klevland @tsunllly

Notes

• The definition of hypermedia is not completely clear

• Good metaphors and good success examples are needed

• Clarify advantages of hypermedia, not being so technical or giving implementation details, but focusing on advantages

  Hypermedia:

  • Avoids hardcoding and potentially breaking clients
  • Reduces versioning problems
  • Avoids logic being duplicated on server and clients
  • Gives meaning to resource relations
  • Affordance discoverability, some states are not available from current state -> Adaptable clients
  • Reduces developer annoyance.
  • Improves understanding between servers and client
  • One of its goals is not needing human factor to fix something broken (Or at least reduce human participation)

• It must be a human-machine representation balance

• Currently exists a lots of formats to represent hypermedia. They need to mature, and actually be adopted/adapted by developers.

• TOOLING 👍 !!! To get benefits without worrying about implementation details.

• Clients must be prepared to work with hypermedia apis

• Simple patterns (best practices) must arise developing for hypermedia:

  • Example: when adding a new field in response, maybe it can be added automatically to the fields to fill in the view
  • How to react when migrating from v1 to v2?

• A great analogy was given: When you are searching for images on google you know where the button is located. If you don't find it in the usual place, then you search the link across the whole page and if you do not find it with the name of "Images", but you see a link named "Pictures" you follow it and if it contains what you are searching then you can continue transparently.