Comment by recursivedoubts

3 months ago

Yeah, that was too short a response, sorry I was bouncing around a lot in the thread.

The essay I linked to somewhat agrees w/your general point, which is that hypermedia is (mostly) wasted on automated consumers of REST (in the original sense) APIs.

I don't think it's a bad thing to split your hypermedia API and your JSON API:

https://htmx.org/essays/splitting-your-apis/

(NB, some people recommend even splitting your JSON-for-app & JSON-for-integration APIs: https://max.engineer/server-informed-ui)

I also don't think it's hard to avoid duplicating your effort, assuming you have a decent model layer:

https://htmx.org/essays/mvc/

As far as efficiency goes, HTML is typically within spitting distance of JSON particularly if you have compression enabled:

https://github.com/1cg/html-json-size-comparison

And is also may be more efficient to generate because it isn't using reflection:

https://github.com/1cg/html-json-speed-comparison

(Those costs will typically be dwarfed by data store access anyway)

So, all in all, I kind of agree with you on the pointlessness of REST purity when it comes to general purpose APIs, but disagree in that I think you can profitably split your application API (hypermedia) from your automation API (JSON) and get the best of both worlds, and not duplicate code too much if you have a proper model layer.

Hope that's more useful.

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recursivedoubts

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cryptonector  3 months ago

Thanks, I appreciate the detailed response.

> So, all in all, I kind of agree with you on the pointlessness of REST purity when it comes to general purpose APIs, but disagree in that I think you can profitably split your application API (hypermedia) from your automation API (JSON) and get the best of both worlds, and not duplicate code too much if you have a proper model layer.

I've yet to see what I proposed, so I've no idea how it would work out. Given the current state of the world I think devs will continue to write JS-dependent SPAs that use JSON APIs. Grandstanding about the meaning of REST is not going to change that.

  • recursivedoubts  3 months ago

    I've built apps w/ hypermedia APIs & JSON APIs for automation, which is great because the JSON API can stay stable and not get dragged around by changes in your application.

    As far as the future, we'll see. htmx (and other hypermedia-oriented libraries, like unpoly, hotwire, data-star, etc) is getting some traction, but I think you are probably correct that fixed-format JSON APIs talking to react front-ends is going to be the most common approach for the foreseeable future.