[Ramone]

There are a benefits, but most people won't notice them without first actually using a hypermedia API.

* It's self-documenting. Client developers can find all the endpoints just by clicking around (instead of reading mountains of docs).

* Client apps don't need to keep a list of hard-coded urls for random access, removing one of the most brittle parts of client apps (they should know about rels of course, but those end up being easier to keep track of).

Once you actually use an API like this, other APIs feel like they're in the stone age and how to do things with them seems like a continual guessing game. And it's still simple as hell -- remember it's just json with links. It's not like that requires a lot of extra effort.

[RTigger]

Fair enough - I haven't actually used a hypermedia API (short of OData). I really can't see the documenting point though. Sure, you get a list of actions that you can perform, but you get those in a response object. Some people compare this to "intellisense documentation", but really it's more like having to decompile the library to figure out what's going on. You have to do something extra in order to figure out what the next step is, rather than just having it available. Also, I'm pretty sure any API that is currently "discoverable" probably also has a full suite of documentation. Why do the same thing twice?

Not sure about other languages, but most of the client apps I make don't use hardcoded urls - they use a base API url, and then modifications for specific resources. The RestSharp library for C# is a great example of how this works, and even in javascript it's not hard to refactor things so they use a base url and append path & parameters based on the models you're working with.

I'm not arguing the simplicity of it, although it would be more simple to implement if we agreed on a standard like in the original article. I'm just arguing the value.