Building Hypermedia APIs with HTML5 and Node

Appendix A. Afterword

When you have completed 95 percent of your journey, you are only halfway there.

- Japanese Proverb

And so we reach the end of this little adventure.^[3]But, even though the page count for this project has reached its conclusion, the book itself is far from complete.

Over the last few years, I have been researching, experimenting, and speaking about the role hypermedia plays in implementing long-lived solutions running over HTTP. A distillation of many of those ideas appears within these pages. However, there are still many more areas to explore, many more examples that could be provided to amplify and clarify the ideas exposed here. In my mind, at least, this list is endless.

However, the aim of this book was not to create a definitive work on designing hypermedia APIs. Instead, it was to identify helpful concepts, suggest useful methodologies, and provide pertinent examples that encourage architects, designers, and developers to see the value and utility of hypermedia in their own implementations. This book is more of an invitation to explore than an admonition to follow my lead.

At the start of many of my presentations I warn my audience to be aware that I have an underlying agenda of which they should be aware. That, along with imparting information about the power and promise of hypermedia-oriented designs, my work has another purpose. I tell my listeners that one of my goals is, quite simply, to increase the amount of links and forms in the data messages sent ...