| Bias alert: I'm the newest Rails committer and one of the bigger proponents of Hypermedia APIs in the Ruby world. Anyway, many, many other companies _do_ find hypermedia principles to be useful. See Balanced Payments, for example: > Fun fact: our internal statistics show that client libraries that construct the uri receive roughly 2 orders of magnitude more 404 status codes from Balanced than clients which use the uri directly.
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> http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1999/03/the-mark... GitHub is starting to add hypermedia stuff to their responses: http://developer.github.com/ Here's their main API guy talking about the advantages even this partial implementation has achieved: https://twitter.com/pengwynn/status/281849041707474944 https://twitter.com/pengwynn/status/281849329243787265 Twilio has always had elements of hypermedia in their API, and are considering moving further in that direction in the future. They had me speak at their conference for the last two years in a row about the topic specifically. That said, if not doing hypermedia doesn't hurt you, don't change what you're doing! If you're interested in evolving your API over time while supporting old clients and behaviors in a simpler way, then consider checking it out. REST/hypermedia APIs are focused on long-term stability, evolvability, and massive scalability. If you don't need those things, you don't need hypermedia. That said, I'd be happy to answer any questions on the topic, though I'm really busy today, so it might take a while to get back to you. |