API Design Guide

Post by dflock » Sat, Feb 25, 2017, 10:51 PM UTC

theptip wrote: post #189

dflock wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, correct. However, this relies on clients using your API in a hateos way - which they have to go out of their way to do: starting at /, reading the responses, navigating down only using URLs that you return, etc... No clients bother to do this, in the real world - they just hard code/compose the URLs that they need to use. Why make extra http calls when you don't have to? Why parse all the json-hal (or whatever)…

Very true - that is the best counterargument. However, we're still back to the worst-case here being the best case without HATEOAS, and well-behaved clients can still reap the benefits even if there are some misbehaving clients requiring multiple versions to be deployed in parallel. There's a good question about how long you can cache those URLs for as well; it's a non-starter for a client to have to traverse the who…