You’ll find TV, movie, news, and other media APIs employing hypermedia very successfully, providing a very rich developer experience, providing links, formal media types, and other structural elements that help make for a better API. Hypermedia makes sense for content centric and media focused APIs. In reality, hypermedia is extremely useful for specific types of APIs that rely on affordances we take for granted from the web. Ironically, many hypermedia believers have also fallen prey to the same trope, and declared that hypermedia is the one right way of delivering APIs, and you should ignore all other patterns. Ignore all the REST API haters, and make sure you properly educate yourself about why it is the dominant API design pattern, and how it will help you lay the foundation you need for your API platform.Īnother API design pattern people love to hate on is what is known as HATEOS or simple hypermedia. The number of REST APIs, also known as web or HTTP APIs dwarfs the number of other API design patterns in use. If you are new to APIs, REST is where you should be spending your time learning about the API landscape, and understanding what is possible. Sure, REST has many flaws and shortcomings, but it still is the lowest cost, simplest, and most ubiquitous approach to delivering APIs that will be usable by the widest possible audience. However, the reality of the matter is that REST is where you should begin your journey, and will remain a staple of the API sector. The API haters love to bash on RESTful design practices. If a vendor, blogger, or analyst is saying that one API technology will completely replace another API technology, and the previous way is the wrong way, I recommend moving on, finding other sources of information to educate yourself and inform your organization’s overall API strategy. Playing on a popular belief that technology is perpetually moving faster than ever before, and you have to always be buying into what is next, otherwise you will miss out on the future, and be eaten alive by your competition. It is what vendors do to dethrone what came before, and try to get a foothold within markets. I’ve had a front row seat for several new technologies to emerge within the API sector, and with each one there is always an aggressive group of technologists who like to employ a pretty old and tired API trope that the new technology is the future, and what already is represent the wrong, or out of date way of doing things. Counteracting some of the more vendor focused storytelling in the space that works to confuse, distort, and shame folks for their approach to delivering APIs-providing a more pragmatic view of how we should doing APIs. One of the areas I’ve been heavily investing in as part of my API industry research over the last couple of years is to help people understand how they can invest in a diverse API toolbox, and develop the awareness they need to be successful in designing, developing, and delivering APIs at scale, for a variety of use cases. This is great for them, but it isn’t always great for the folks who aren’t quite as passionate and are just working to understand the API landscape and make sense of the different patterns, services, and tooling out there. API folks are great at being passionate about the technologies they believe in.
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