[fellowniusmonk]

I worked for a company that was all hateoas. In the formal sense, explicitly structured around the concept, not the sense that html has both data and actions via links, it worked, it was a real product, but it was slow and terrible to develop and debug.

The front end ui was entirely driven, ui and functionality exposed by the data/action payload.

I'm still not sure if it's because of the implementation or because there is something fundemental.

I came away from that thinking that the db structure, the dag and data flow is what's really important for thinking about any problem space and any ui considerations should be not first class.

But I'm not a theorist, I just found a specific real, real formal working implementation in prod to be not great, it's a little hard even now to understand why.

Maybe it just works for purely text interfaces, adding any design or dynamic interaction causes issues.

I think maybe it's that the data itself should be first class, that well typed data should exist and a system that allows any ui and behavior to be attached to that data is more important than an api saying what explicit mutations are allowed.

If I was to explore this, I think folder and files, spreadsheet, dbs, data structures, those are the real things and the tools we use to mutate them are second order and should be treated as such. Any action that can be done on data should be defined elsewhere and not treated as being the same importance, but idk, that's just me thinking outloud.

[alexpetros]

> I worked for a company that was all hateoas. In the formal sense, explicitly structured around the concept, not the sense that html has both data and actions via links, it worked, it was a real product, but it was slow and terrible to develop and debug.

The web is also a real product, one that's (when not bloated with adtech) capable of being fast and easy to develop on. That other people have tried to do HATEOAS and failed to make it nice is part of why it's so useful to acknowledge as valid the one implementation that has wildly succeeded.

[fellowniusmonk]

I do just want to be clear because I'm not 100% following I don't think.

You aren't saying hypermedia/hyperlinks served by a backend equal hateaos are you?

hateaos is from 2000 isn't it? Long after hyperlinks and the web already existed.

[dragonwriter]

REST, including HATEOAS, was largely retrospective documentation of the architectural underpinning of the WWW by Roy Fielding (who played an important role in web technology from 1993 on, was the co-lead for the HTTP/1.0 spec, the lead for the original HTTP/1.1 spec, and also, IIRC, lead or co-lead on the original URL spec. The things it documented existed before it documented them.

[fellowniusmonk]

Thanks. Appreciate it.

[masklinn]

> You aren't saying hypermedia/hyperlinks served by a backend equal hateaos are you?

That’s exactly what it is.

> hateaos is from 2000 isn't it? Long after hyperlinks and the web already existed.

> Over the past six years, the REST architectural style has been used to guide the design and development of the architecture for the modern Web, as presented in Chapter 6. This work was done in conjunction with my authoring of the Internet standards for the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) and Uniform Resource Identifiers (URI), the two specifications that define the generic interface used by all component interactions on the Web.

This is straight from the intro of fielding’s doctoral dissertation.

[JimDabell]

REST / HATEOAS is basically one of the main architects of the web saying “these are the things we did that made the web work so well”. So yes, REST was published after the web already existed, but no that doesn’t mean that the web is not REST / HATEOAS.

[dpe82]

Was this recently, using something like HTMX? Or years ago using some other system (or pure/standard HTML)?

[fellowniusmonk]

Within the last 3 years. They had their own open sourced functional typescript framework that drove the front end.

You could use whatever lightweight rendering you wanted, mostly it was very minimal react but that hardly mattered. One thing that was a positive was how little the ui rendering choice mattered.

I don't really want to say more as it's unique enough to be equivalent to naming the company itself.