HTML Hypermedia APIs and Adaptive Web Design

Gustaf Nilsson Kotte / @gustaf_nk

About me

Two areas of interest

Hypermedia APIs - No application logic in API clients
Adaptive Web Design - Multi-device web

Working nicely together!

Demo, Kanban board

HTML Hypermedia API + Adaptive Web Design

Prefer fat APIs over fat clients

http://martinfowler.com/articles/richardsonMaturityModel.html

Hypermedia APIs

What is the Hypermedia Constraint?

You do stuff by reading pages and then either follow links or submit forms.

— Jon Moore

Use HTML for Hypermedia APIs

Lots of hypermedia controls
Old, standardized, everybody knows HTML
Good tooling support

https://vimeo.com/20781278 http://codeartisan.blogspot.se/2012/07/using-html-as-media-type-for-your-api.html http://amundsen.com/hypermedia/html/

More...

Great for learning about hypermedia!

Interlude

JSON is ok :)

Also, hypermedia is a bit harder to consume in general

Example: Microformats2, entities

<li class="h-item">
  <div class="p-name"><%= item.name %></div>
  <div class="p-status"><%= item.status %></div>
  <div class="p-description"><%= item.description %></div>
  <div class="p-forms">
    ...
  </div>
  <div class="p-links">
    ...
  </div>
</li>

Example: Microformats2, forms

<div class="p-forms">
  <form data-rel="move backlog" action="/items/backlog" method="POST">
    <input name="id" type="hidden" value="4">
    <input title="submit" type="submit" value="Move to backlog">
  </form>
  <form data-rel="move verify next" action="/items/verify" method="POST">
    <input name="id" type="hidden" value="4">
    <input title="submit" type="submit" value="Move to verify">
  </form>
</div>