[msbarnett]

> As long as the 'photos' link relation does not change, it can point to whatever URL it wants, and that URL or URL structure can change over time without damage to the client.

So here's where my skepticism kicks in:

How often are you really expecting your URL structure to change, in practice? And when the URL structure does change, what percentage of the time does the change in URL structure also coincide with a change in semantics that clients logic will need to be changed to take into account?

In my experience the answer to those questions is 1) Very rarely. 2) Nearly always.

[gamache]

You're preaching for YAGNI, which is a philosophy that's more good than bad, for sure.

I am lamenting that doing hypermedia APIs properly isn't the default in Rails. I call out Rails because its massive appeal (to which I am no stranger) is doing It right by default, all over the place for the common case.

That obviates YAGNI, because it implies no extra cost incurred for doing it right. I'd rather enable It rather than assume I ain't gonna need It, all things being equal.

That said, I have worked in companies large enough that the interlocking pieces are pretty far removed, yet expected to interoperate fully. Having and using link relations could have saved us a couple of headaches. I am hopeful the Rails-api project might approach this with more.... maturity?

[msbarnett]

> That obviates YAGNI, because it implies no extra cost incurred for doing it right. I'd rather enable It rather than assume I ain't gonna need It, all things being equal.

All I can say to this is that we have vastly different approaches to engineering.

Features are debt. Adding features you don't need now and will probably never need in service of some kind of ideological purity ("doing it right") is the worst kind of deficit spending.

I've done my time in big enterprise vast complex interlocking highly abstracted development. For every 1 time prematurely optimizing for flexibility happened to pay off, it resulted in onerous development and maintenance overhead for no benefit 9 other times. Do the simplest thing that works. If you don't need it now, assume you ain't gonna need it and only build it if and when you have a pressing need for it. To me, these are the very core of sound, reliable engineering.