RESTful Web Clients

Chapter 3. The Representor Pattern

“But it is a pipe.”

“No, it’s not,” I said. “It’s a drawing of a pipe. Get it? All representations of a thing are inherently abstract. It’s very clever.”

John Green, The Fault in Our Stars

Bob and Carol

“Hi, Carol. I’m just stopping by to talk you about some server-side features. Specifically, about implementing support for multiple output formats. See, we started with HTML and we just recently added support for plain JSON.”

“Right, and some of the teams were starting to ask about support for additional registered formats like HAL, Collection+JSON, Siren, and so forth. We were about to dig into that when you and I launched the two teams.”

“Yep, your old colleagues have been bringing me up to speed and I wanted to check back with you and go over your initial notes.”

“Well, I don’t know how much I can offer since we have just begun our discovery.”

“OK, well, I have some solid info on the formats you mentioned, but what I really wanted ...