hateoas apis are about relationships
Post on 02-Dec-2014
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HATEOAS APISMatt Bishop, Product Architect at Elastic Path
@MattBishopL3
Actually, it’s more like 14,000
1 minute per API = 6 weeks end-to-end
www.elasticpath.com @MattBishopL3
What happened in the 90s?
1989 HTML invented (thanks Tim!) 1992 First browsers built 1994 Netscape launched 1995 Internet Explorer in Win95, IIS
bundled in NT, Apache, PHP released
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Make a Website, 1995-style
Web sites were coded in:• Java• C / C++• Perl• ColdFusion• Python
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Templates Blew the Doors off the Internet
Late 90s Microsoft ASP, Apache JSP, DreamWeaver, Velocity, etc.
Templates opened internet development to the common man
Templates made data BROWSABLE
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Templates made data browsable
Made linking easy <asp:HyperLink … <a href=“<%= getLink
(somedata) %>
Easy linking means easy browsability
Drives the Network Effect
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APIs are stuck in the 80s
…1987, to be exact (28,174 hosts)
APIs must be browsable before they can be adopted by 100m organizations
100m organizations == your sister’s dress store, my mom’s knitting club
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Comfortably Numb
We can stay stuck here if we don’t link our resources together
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Links are about Relationships Relationships are hard
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Relationships are not hard after all
• Relationships are a fundamental part of being an animal
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Relationships make Versionless APIs possible
Relationships are very stable The resources themselves move, but
their relationships do not GET /profiles/id• “addresses”: “/profiles/id/addresses”
? Hmm maybe addresses should be their own resource ?GET /profiles/id• “addresses”: “/addresses”
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Relationships make APIs browsable
Browsable APIs == Browsable data == mass adoption
First step is to make it easy to link
www.elasticpath.com @MattBishopL3
Cortex API Engine
Elastic Path’s API endeavors have failed four times 2010 drank the HATEOAS Kool-Aid, reset our API
effort Found no frameworks to help past URI-to-method
mapping and ser/deser We built an engine using some existing
technology (Jax-RS, Spring, Shiro) and our own work
Cortex is an API engine that happens to run commerce
www.elasticpath.com @MattBishopL3
Cortex Design Philosophy
• Small, simple resources written by BAs• Small, simple state changes via controls
• Form• Selector
• “Secret Admirer” rule• All Operations are identified
• REST is the Gestalt, HTTP is a transport
www.elasticpath.com @MattBishopL3
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