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by steveklabnik 4861 days ago
> (wow, that's a lot of letters)

We're all calling these "hypermedia APIs" these days.

> with an associated client that actually uses it?

I have written a toy client here: https://gist.github.com/steveklabnik/2187514

You can run it against this site, written in node: http://alps-microblog.herokuapp.com/

Or this site, written in Rails: https://rstat.us/

It (should, I haven't tried it in a long while) work with both just fine. They both use the ALPS microblogging spec. yay generic clients!

As for people who have 'more real' ones: GitHub, Twilio (partially, more in the future), Balanced Payments (YC W11, iirc), Comcast (though that's internal :() Netflix has aspects, FoxyCart.

This year will be the year of examples.

1 comments

Interesting. I didn't realize that there were specs like ALPS for defining how to implement this kind of thing. Isn't it still a little difficult to do this for APIs that don't neatly fit into some kind of generic profile (e.g. microblogging)?
There's a few different ways to go about things, but every app has some kind of domain. If you're the first, then you can define how it works. :)

Mike Amundsen's terribly named but amazingly well written 'Building Hypermedia APIs in HTML5 and Node' is a really thorough examination of this topic.