September 2013
Intermediate to advanced
406 pages
10h 35m
English
Content preview from RESTful Web APIsBecome an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
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Chapter 4. Hypermedia
The story so far: URLs identify resources. A client makes HTTP requests to those URLs. A server sends representations in response, and over time the client builds up a picture of the resource state, as seen through the representations. Eventually the client makes that fateful PUT or POST or PATCH request, sending a representation back to the server and modifying resource state.
Look closer, and you’ll see a question that hasn’t been answered: how does the client know which requests it can make? There are infinitely many URLs. How does a client know which URLs have representations behind them and which ones will give a 404 error? Should the client send an entity-body with its POST request? If so, what should the entity-body look like? HTTP defines a set of protocol semantics, but which subset of those semantics does this web server support on this URL right now?
The missing piece of the puzzle is hypermedia. Hypermedia connects resources to each other, and describes their capabilities in machine-readable ways. Properly used, hypermedia can solve—or at least mitigate—the usability and stability problems found in today’s web APIs.
Like REST, hypermedia isn’t a single technology described by a standards document somewhere. Hypermedia is a strategy, implemented in different ways by dozens of technologies. I’ll cover several hypermedia standards in the next three chapters, and a whole lot more in Chapter 10. It’s up to you to choose the technologies that fit your business ...
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