JSON at Work

Chapter 8. JSON and Hypermedia

Imagine building an application in HTML for use in a web browser. You can add forms, links, and buttons by using standard HTML, and the browser renders your new controls without requiring a new release of the browser. In the “olden days,” it didn’t work this way. If we released a new version of our server-side application with new functionality, we often had to release a new version of the client code to pair with it. Browsers changed this expectation.

We now live in a world where “rich clients” are coming back in the form of apps on people’s devices. We could just have phones access web pages, but for various reasons, people (and companies) want native apps as icons that they can touch on their devices. So how can we get rich native apps back, while still benefitting from the configurability of the browser? Hypermedia. We send not only the data, but also the actions the user can take on the data, along with a representation of how to trigger that action.

So far, the RESTful API calls and JSON responses in this book have been isolated (without reference to other calls). Each JSON response from the Speakers API has just contained data about the speaker, but without providing any information about other related resources and actions.

Hypermedia enables a REST API to guide its Consumers on the following:

• Links to other related resources (e.g., other APIs). For example, a Conference API could provide links to the Reservation, Speaker, or Venue APIs ...