Hypermedia: Why Y'all Hatin'?

Convener

Kevin Swiber (@kevinswiber)

Notes courtesy of Kevin O'Hara (@kevinohara80).

Attendees

(many: please add yourself)

• Kris Kleva - @klevland
• Jeffrey Pryciak - @DRogueDeveloper
• Lou Schilling - @lschill

Notes

###Objections

• Bandwidth problems and payload sizes
• Mobile apps - round trips can cause bad UX
• It's more work - there should be tools
• Can't reduce clients from breaking
• Hypermedia is not unbreakable
• Linking is useful, what about the rest
• More complicated
• Problems it solves aren't my problems
• PR problems, maybe hypermedia is bad for name
• Not many good examples
• Nobody can explain it in a short, concise manner
• Still too many cases where hypermedia can break
• Changing links is the only consistent benefit
• The big guys aren't using it (google, etc)
• The possibilities are kind of intimidating

Responses

• Caching fixes responses
• Design should avoid traversal, things are one step away
  • Analogy with UX: Reduce number of clicks to achieve the wished action
• Design so that you give them menus vs recipes.
• Hypermedia makes it ok to not build your API 100% correctly the first time
• Stop trying to explain what hypermedia is to everyone. Most don't care.
• There needs to be a client education piece to this to teach how to leverage a hypermedia API
• People don't read docs. Media types help provide the information.
• Talk to the CEO about at problems you'll solve, not about hypermedia itself

Additional

• Should start being upfront that we're pioneers and this shit is risky