Don't hate the HATEOS
DHH has a post on some of the hoopla around hypermedia API’s over at SvN, complete with a cool picture of the WS-*. While I agree with most of his points, he’s missing the larger point of API discoverability.
The reason discoverability is front and center in RESTful API’s isn’t some naive belief that the semantics of the API will just magically be discovered by the client — instead, it’s a strategy to keep logic that belongs on the server out of clients. When a client is told that they have to discover the URL for posting a comment to an article, they are also told to prepare that that operation might not be available. There are lots of reasons why that operation may not be possible for the client; none of them need to interest the client, all it cares about is whether that operation is advertised in the article or not.
DHH also puts up a nice strawman, and then ceremoniously burns it to the ground:
The idea that you can write one client to access multiple different APIs in any meaningful way disregards the idea that different apps do different things.
Again, that misses the point, especially of discoverability. Not every API has exactly one deployment. Many clients need to work with multiple different deployments of the same API; the Deltacloud API is a good example of how discoverability lays down clear guidelines for clients on what they can assume, and what they have to be prepared for being different with each different endpoint they want to talk to. You can look at that as making the contract between server and client explicit in the API. Discoverability makes conditional promises to the client: if you see X, you may safely do Y.
We are all in agreement though that overall we want to tread very lightly when it comes to standardizing API mechanisms - I think there are some areas around RESTful API’s where some carefully crafted standards might help, but staying out of range of the WS-* is much more important.
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