How do we help developers implement the APIs of tomorrow (and today)?
HEY! First, if you were at this session, THANK YOU. It was incredibly interesting and helpful.
Second, if you have any notes to add, please just log in and hit that edit button.
Here are the notes I took on the board. Sorry for the handwriting.
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Take a stand, adjust and iterate
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The objective is to build Hypermedia Unbreakable APIs, self-repairing APIs (Adamantium)
One of the key things that came from this - and which led many discussions as well as my thinking going forward - is that hypermedia is not necessarily difficult, but there seems to not be a solid consensus or understanding on exactly what it is. In the end, what we really want to describe are "adaptable APIS", which has the value proposition right there in the name. Hypermedia is one of the ways - and, at this time, the preferable way - that we can build these APIs. But we're leading the folks implementing these APIs down the dark woods of implementation details like which response format to use and how to link between relationships. Instead, they should be focusing on how to model their resources so their developer customers can make best use of them.
One way we can help is by providing the tooling to make this easier. In the end, three main tools were discussed - server libraries to help implementors more easily create APIs, client libraries to support the folks consuming those APIs and browsers to make it easier to explore what's available in an API without writing code. Several sessions were later held by a number of folks on how to build these tools.
Kris Kleva (@Klevland) others???