REST, Hypermedia, and the Semantic Gap

REST, Hypermedia, and the Semantic Gap

Leonard Richardson’s 2008 book "RESTful Web Services" taught us the power of the "Uniform Interface" (GET PUT POST & DELETE). His 2013 book, "RESTful Web APIs" goes one step further and describes how Hypermedia APIs can increase flexibility and reusability of APIs.

But what are Hypermedia APIs? What do they look like? And why are they "better" than the common CRUD APIs we all use today? This talk illustrates the differences between CRUD and Hypermedia APIs and how you can design & implement clients and services that can take advantages of APIs based on hypermedia, not just resources and a tiny handful of verbs.

Along the way, we’ll look at working versions of both styles and get a chance to see why adding more hypermedia in service responses can result in more functionality on the client while reducing the amount of API-specific code on the client.

Director of API Architecture, API Academy, CA Technologies

An internationally known author and lecturer, Mike Amundsen travels throughout the world consulting and speaking on a wide range of topics including distributed network architecture, Web application development, and other subjects.

In his role of Director of Architecture for the API Academy, Amundsen heads up the API Architecture and Design Practice in North America. He is responsible for working with companies to provide insight on how best to capitalize on the myriad opportunities APIs present to both consumers and the enterprise.

Amundsen has authored numerous books and papers on programming over the last 15 years. His most recent book is a collaboration with Leonard Richardson titled "RESTful Web APIs" published in 2013. His 2011 book, “Building Hypermedia APIs with HTML5 and Node”, is an oft-cited reference on building adaptable Web applications.