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Comment by e67f70028a46fba | Hacker News Reader

i work on intercooler, you can AMA

as usual, a lot of negative comments from HN on the approach (which is admittedly against the grain) but I've used it for a relatively large and successful web app (rails back end) and it has worked out well compared to the SPA architectures I've had to deal with

i think the philosophical roots in REST/HATEOAS are worth considering, if you are open minded:

http://intercoolerjs.org/2016/01/18/rescuing-rest.html

http://intercoolerjs.org/2016/05/08/hatoeas-is-for-humans.ht...

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Have you tried something like prmd [0]? And if so, what are your thoughts on it?

I used it at my previous job, but didn't find it gave me that many benefits, although there wasn't anything particularly wrong with it either. It just seems like a challenging problem to properly solve with any organization.

I was initially really interested in GraphQL and Relay, but when I tried em out I found em lacking for our small engineering team. I feel kinda similar with all these other alternative tools. I think if you have any API stability problems, you need to tackle it at an organizational level. The API team needs to communicate openly with the web frontend and mobile app team (which might include a cross-section of highly-mixed-specialty people) to make sure all changes are fully backwards compatible. I don't think the tools do a great job at helping you tackle complex issues.

[0] https://github.com/interagent/prmd

I have used swagger a bit for JSON API development, but didn't find it added much over just keeping it simple and reacting to client needs.

I typically split my externally facing JSON API out from the main application (which uses HTML/intercooler) because the use cases are typically so different: the JSON API needs to be general and abstract whereas the web application UI has a lot of fiddly little specific data needs that are better implemented on the back end, where you have full access to the domain model and a proper query language.

The example code snippet on the website has a synthax error. The '!' in the comment embracement is missing.

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