Omar Diab
5 de diciembre de 2013
Great book on the future of the web
Fantastic book about hypermedia, a potential future for the web! I think this should be required reading for all API designers and consumers. It might not strike those who play fast and loose with code as very interesting, as its focused on good design rather than getting products out in record time, but I think it's something we should all follow.It's very clearly written and accessible, and doesn't require too much knowledge to dive into. For reference, I started learning programming around 3 years ago through my current college major.Here's the Cliffs Notes version:The problem that the author approaches is that APIs these days are not consistent with one another or even with themselves. This causes several issues:1) APIs are inflexible. Once you release them, it's very difficult to change them. This is ironic, since HTTP and the web is powerful because of its flexibility.2) APIs are not machine-readable. You have to read prose documentation to figure out how they work, and every API is different. At the same time, API documentation is often not up to date or non-existent, and it's unscalable to expect all API developers to maintiain complete documentation for all the APIs that they ever work.3) People create novel, non-standardized APIs for the same general tasks over and over again. There's a staggering amount of repeated work.The hope is that following standards and imposing structure and metadata in your APIs will one day allow API clients to bridge what the author calls "the semantic gap," which amounts to making an API self-document itself by using standardized idioms and good RESTful web practices, a pattern that the author calls "hypermedia."The book lays out the problems, solutions, and process of following good API practices clearly, as well as the kind of work that needs to happen to flesh out hypermedia. In this day and age I think anyone who is writing APIs should read this book first, for the betterment of all—programmers, users, and businesses alike.Ver másVer menos
19 personas la encontraron útil
