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Comment by jcromartie | Hacker News Reader

The example demonstrates an RPC-style HTTP API with pretty URLs. There's no hypermedia in sight. Oh well, we'll figure it out one day...

That being said, this is exactly the sort of documentation that's helpful for this kind of API.

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Just so that I'm clear on this, are you just criticizing that all requests go to /word.json?

IOW, would the following be RESTful?

GET /entries/{word} # Return entries for a word

GET /wordForms/{word} # Rturn other forms for a word

POST /wordForms/{word} # Adds a relationship map for a word

I think the point is that if you are documenting the structure of URIs you are focusing on the wrong thing - a RESTful interface documentation should mostly be about the hypermedia (HTML, XML, JSON,...) that the URIs are embedded in - a particular server should really have the freedom to construct the URIs in any way it wants and still have clients that understand the API work.

See: http://roy.gbiv.com/untangled/2008/rest-apis-must-be-hyperte...

I think when done right (a subjective measurement, to be sure) the only URI you care about for a RESTful API is the root, because the API's resources are defined, along with how they can be manipulated, in the root response or can be transitioned to from there in some way that is defined there.

Yes, that's the key. If the media types are documented (like how browsers and developers understand HTML forms) then you don't need to document every single corner of the API. You can offer a good definition of the media types, and let the resources and links do the rest.

That's the theory... but the gaping hole is that JSON doesn't define hyperlinks like HTML does. Also, I think Subversion tried to make resources discoverable from the root with WebDAV, but it just leads to crazy latency with all the round trips, and everyone agrees it was a mistake.

Any APIs you can point to that actually use "hypermedia" and are successful? Most good APIs I've seen just define a bunch of simple JSON endpoints with predictable URLs.

http://code.google.com/apis/gdata/

http://kenai.com/projects/suncloudapis/pages/Home

I don't know how successful they are.

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