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Comment by akamel | Hacker News Reader

The format is not identical! I was looking for a philosophical comparison between the standard (odata) and jsonapi; I am not seeing much more than a simplified response format (a transform really).

Was hopping to see something more substantive in a comparison other than: 'results are returned under "d" instead of directly "posts"'.

Most project need to answer the simple question of 'why?' - 'why do I as a project exist'; jsonapi.org's is full of 'Ember'; hence why my original comment hinted that it should possibly be called 'emberjsonapi'.

If this is intended to be generic; it should ditch references to Ember and instead refer to similar standards; explaining 'why?' it is better than them.

By all means if your intent is to make a more elegant standard (again comparing to odata) then that's a worthy goal. Stating _that_ will help your 'consumers' understand what they are getting

edit: clean up

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The references to Ember are in the introduction only and provide some historical context for the project. I believe that it's important for standards to come out of real experience, and that the context of that real experience will help others understand the goals. That's why I provided the historical background.

JSON API's design is based around a smart client that wants the ability to avoid making unnecessary requests for documents it already has, and to provide a format that avoids unnecessary duplication in compound documents. It also aims to be relatively easy to implement, both on the client and server, using tools and frameworks that are already widely in use using familiar idioms.

Thank you; That clears it up :)

But you haven't yet answered Akamel's question of why this exists, with comparisons to the existing standards (OData in this case).

Everything I've seen just says that this is simply a subset of OData's functionality. And the features that are being asked for by users commenting on the OP are ones already provided by the existing standard.

And what about querying the data? There have already been questions elsewhere in this thread about how this would work. OData already provides very rich query support, including document projection (returning a subset of a document) through to complex queries navigating multiple relationships (I easily could ask, through a GET query string, to return all the actors who have starred in films that belong to the comedy genre - navigating 3 collections, actors,films,genres). If queries are out of the scope, then fine, but its clear people want to query their data.

So please answer what this offers over existing standards if you want to compete.

Oh, and in response to your earlier post of what OData JSON looks like, you're much better served by linking to v4, not v2 as you did:

http://docs.oasis-open.org/odata/odata-json-format/v4.0/cspr...

That doesn't look so dissimilar.

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