RE: Some Thoughts on Hydra Core

On Wednesday, October 02, 2013 4:09 PM, Ryan J. McDonough
> I was looking at this as well and I had some questions about the
> different specializations of hydra:Operation. I see the can
> hydra:Operation as a means to fill the role of Link relations I have
> been talking about in other threads, On the other hand, I can see this
> getting unwieldy, especially when it comes to POST operations.

Unwieldy in which sense?


> In a nutshell, POST doesn't alway imply create.

Right, POST has no semantics at all. It's kind of a catch-all operation.
Thus Hydra allows you to describe you the concrete semantics by means of
(specialized) operations.


> My question is really about
> having CreateResourceOperation or RetrieveResourceOperation being a
> part of Hydra core. It seems like these might be better served as
> examples rather than part of the core vocabulary.

I agree. I just fear that it than becomes very difficult to explain
Operations without making it looking too complex. Nevertheless, I've created
ISSUE-11 [1] for this as we should definitely discuss this further.


> Another question is around how the Hydra vocabulary is to be used by
> clients. It appears that this is all about runtime discovery and the
> intent the intent is not compile time like WSDL or WADL?

Exactly. Runtime discovery and adaptation works extremely well on the human
web. IMO there are two reasons for that: a) there exist are extremely
powerful clients (browsers) and b) there are quite clever agents controlling
them (humans) :-P

Hydra is a modest attempt to enable the creation of generic clients and to
provide enough semantics to (semi-)automate their operation. I believe the
Hydra console nicely illustrates that it is possible to create completely
generic API clients for Hydra-powered APIs. Unfortunately, I haven't been
able to demonstrate the second aspect just as well yet... but I'm sure we'll
get there!



Cheers,
Markus


[1] https://github.com/HydraCG/Specifications/issues/11


--
Markus Lanthaler
@markuslanthaler

Received on Wednesday, 2 October 2013 19:03:01 UTC