Presentation: Tweet"Generic Hypermedia and Domain-Specific APIs: RESTing in the ALPS"
Hypermedia API is the new catch-phrase, but what is a Hypermedia API? Does this trend lead us toward a debilitating explosion of media types? Can we really create successful hypermedia APIs or is this just the latest hype?
Recently a number of new media types that offer hypermedia support have come into use on the Web including HAL, Collection+JSON, Siren, and more. However, these new designs are not designed to communicate application-specific information (e.g. accounting, microblogging, etc.) in a standard way. Is there a way to resolve this problem?
Drawing on the experience of Dublin Core, Microformats, Activity Streams, and other similar approaches, this talk describes the ALPS (Application-Level Profile Semantics) standard; a way to define the data and workflow details for a Web application and apply these details consistently regardless of the media type in use. Working examples in the talk also show how this standardized definition can make designing, implementing, documenting, and maintaining Web APIs easier and more consistent across multiple media types.
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