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0 pointsgamache13y ago0 comments

You still need to know the meaning of each link relation, that is true. When hypermedia advocates gloss over this, or imply that clients will just magically know what to do with all the data and links coming from the API entry point, it annoys me. It's dishonest.

But what you gain from link relations is worth advocating for:

* Link relations can be standardized across APIs. This opens the door for clients to infer functionality when presented with links it recognizes. There is a list of currently standardized link rels here: http://www.iana.org/assignments/link-relations/link-relation...

* Link relations provide an abstraction layer over the implementation, which may change. They're not unlike an API in and of themselves. As long as the 'photos' link relation does not change, it can point to whatever URL it wants, and that URL or URL structure can change over time without damage to the client.

* Using exclusively URLs to identify resources, as opposed to making the client memorize how to take any ID and map it into a URL, frees up an API to refer to resources outside its scope. That is big, enabling multiple APIs to connect as a proper ecosystem, with outgoing and incoming links. We can't do that today.

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msbarnett13y ago· 2 in thread

> As long as the 'photos' link relation does not change, it can point to whatever URL it wants, and that URL or URL structure can change over time without damage to the client.

So here's where my skepticism kicks in:

How often are you really expecting your URL structure to change, in practice? And when the URL structure does change, what percentage of the time does the change in URL structure also coincide with a change in semantics that clients logic will need to be changed to take into account?

In my experience the answer to those questions is 1) Very rarely. 2) Nearly always.

gamacheOP13y ago

You're preaching for YAGNI, which is a philosophy that's more good than bad, for sure.

I am lamenting that doing hypermedia APIs properly isn't the default in Rails. I call out Rails because its massive appeal (to which I am no stranger) is doing It right by default, all over the place for the common case.

That obviates YAGNI, because it implies no extra cost incurred for doing it right. I'd rather enable It rather than assume I ain't gonna need It, all things being equal.

That said, I have worked in companies large enough that the interlocking pieces are pretty far removed, yet expected to interoperate fully. Having and using link relations could have saved us a couple of headaches. I am hopeful the Rails-api project might approach this with more.... maturity?

msbarnett13y ago

> That obviates YAGNI, because it implies no extra cost incurred for doing it right. I'd rather enable It rather than assume I ain't gonna need It, all things being equal.

All I can say to this is that we have vastly different approaches to engineering.

Features are debt. Adding features you don't need now and will probably never need in service of some kind of ideological purity ("doing it right") is the worst kind of deficit spending.

I've done my time in big enterprise vast complex interlocking highly abstracted development. For every 1 time prematurely optimizing for flexibility happened to pay off, it resulted in onerous development and maintenance overhead for no benefit 9 other times. Do the simplest thing that works. If you don't need it now, assume you ain't gonna need it and only build it if and when you have a pressing need for it. To me, these are the very core of sound, reliable engineering.

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