Show HN: Pumpkin – An open-source HN clone

Sorry, excessive examples are something I use often to better illustrate my points.

I never said this is what you said or even meant, I was simply illustrating how it might sound like, and why some people might have downvoted you.

Hopefully that makes sense : )

I was answering his question of why he was getting down-voted, no more no less.

>> If his points are valid then that should be sufficient.

In theory, yes, in the real world, appearances matter. Being right is only one part of the equation.. if you can't convince the other person then it doesn't really matter whether you're right or not.

If you're giving feedback and it sounds like you're demolishing someone, chances are your feedback won't be listened to. It's not the end of the world, obviously, but you're losing your time and the readers too.

>> His criticism was legitimate, there is no reason to waste time nor energy on his "tone-of-writing".

The irony here is how by not having the right tone his feedback weren't understood correctly, and hence wasted the time and energy of most readers.

>> Replies like yours contribute nothing.

The irony, again.

I can't speak for the GP, but I also tried the demo and I did find the design sleek and appealing.

But when I clicked the comments link on the first post on the front page, it took about 20 seconds to see the comments. Also voting for a comment made the page unresponsive for about a second.

I don't know if this is because just the demo server, the underlying technology or lack of optimization in the actual app, but this is what made the otherwise cool demo less interesting to me.

I might attract a lot of flack here for saying this, but lobstr.es is a lot HN could have been, alas it is yet to get some serious amount of participation.

Can i get an invite from you? My email is admin@tech4sky.com

Often the best approach is to have e.g. /topics be both the API endpoint and the web endpoint for the collection of topics resource and e.g. /topic/<identifier> be the endpoint for individual topic resources.

In both cases the server loads the same data, but if the negotiated content type is text/html then it renders an HTML template with the data and returns a page showing a (probably paginated) topic list along with a form for posting a new topic (possibly hidden and revealed by javascript on a button click, etc).

The form would POST to the /topics endpoint which would create the new topic and then return a redirect to the /topic/<identifier>. Another form might also allow replacing existing topics by PUTing to a /topic/<identifier> endpoint. Or via PATCH for use via AJAX.

The actual /topic/<identifier> links in both the HTML and JSON views would really be something like /topic/<id> or /topic/<uuid> or /topic/<slug>. Again, if you click on one of the topic links in the HTML view in a browser then when you land on the individual topic link it will also negotiate the text/html content-type and you'll get the topic detail page, etc.

If you have pages like "most recent topics" or "trending topics" etc they could be mapped to separate collection resources like /topics/recent, /topics/trending, etc that are just projections of the appropriate subset of the overall collection resource.

If the negotiated content-type of any GET request is application/json (or e.g. application/edn) then it returns the API results in the appropriate format. If you follow one of the same links served from the JSON file from your API client, then it will again negotiate application/json and it will get the JSON version the topic detail. The JSON results might be in a format like http://stateless.co/hal_specification.html.

The whole idea behind REST resources, though, is that the HTTP method expresses the action, and the URI identifies the object acted upon. In that conceptual scheme, there is neither need nor place for verbs in the URI; POST /topics/add is redundant, because POSTing to a collection already has the semantic value of "add an item to this collection". Similarly, if you're modifying an existing item, you don't need to PUT /topics/23/edit or what-have-you; PUT already means "replace the existing content with the request body I'm sending", so all else that's required is to identify the particular content to replace, for which /topics/23 suffices. Having the HTTP method and the endpoint gives you all the clarity you need in terms of what a request does, and to which thing it does it.

An additional, and very non-trivial, benefit of this scheme is that it is standard and discoverable: "standard", in the sense that these basic HTTP operations are defined in RFC 2616 and exhaustively documented there; "discoverable", in the sense that knowing some endpoint represents a REST resource API instantly tells you quite a lot about how you can interact with it, and you can find out the rest from the responses you get when you make API requests -- which responses RFC 2616 also explains how to interpret.

Not everything is simple. REST resources are, and they need not have a complex API. Poorly thought-out APIs for simple things require a lot of documentation, that mostly being lousy explanations of the interactions between an incomplete set of edge and corner cases. Well thought-out APIs for simple things barely require any documentation at all.

The REST resource API is a sterling example of the latter sort; once you're familiar with RFC 2616, you can discover everything else you need from the responses you get to API requests. This is not so when redundant verbs -- POST /topics/add -- are used in a backwards namespace -- POST /add/topic -- with uncertain naming -- /add/topic, so if I want all topics do I GET /topics or /topic, or /get/topics, or what? What makes all this confusion more worthwhile than just using REST resource endpoints? Do you want people who consume your API to curse your name for making them deal with a bunch of needless impedance matching, or to effortlessly retrieve what you're offering and do something amazing with it?