| > That's not useful for a programmatic API. You can add a discovery layer to a programmatic API A discovery layer isn't necessary if you're using hypermedia as intended. "Discovery" just means a loosely coupled format associates the "logical" addresses, which your program shouldn't know a priori, with a readable name, which your program uses to find the logical addresses it actually needs. It's like the difference between programming in assembly language with direct memory addresses (URLs), vs using a programming language that abstracts memory addresses with named variables (hypermedia format that associates readable names to URLs), thus decoupling clients from needing to understand potentially opaque URL formats. The real problem with REST is that REST frameworks don't provide any guidance or support for any hypermedia format that isn't HTML, and HTML isn't well suited to programmatic interaction. None of the commonly used data interchange formats support distinguishing embedded links from other data, so they aren't hypermedia formats. No wonder doing REST right is so difficult. > doing so from a programmatic client when you could literally just store the correct endpoint and perform your call directly is nonsense: it's inefficient, it's annoying and it's pointlessly verbose. Except it's not pointless, it allows painless server-side upgrades. It might cost you some efficiency, but it provides significant flexibility. |