Hello

Hi Everyone,

I'm Ross. I work on retail and ecommerce APIs for a company 
called One iota in the UK. This is my first venture into the 
world of W3C community groups, so please point me in the right 
direction if I'm doing this wrong!

I've been interested in the idea of self-describing APIs for a 
few years now. I've implemented some simple features into our 
existing API to allow methods and acceptable datatypes to be 
described, but I'd like to push that a bit further, ideally in a 
standards-compliant way.

We're on the brink of transitioning our monolithic PHP codebase 
to microservices. To avoid the chaos of Developer Open Season, 
we're looking at putting together a framework to allow devs to 
get started easily, and make sure that the path of least 
resistance is pointing in the right direction. I'd like to 
implement Hydra (or something like it) as part of this 
framework, as it will lower our support load if we don't need to 
develop an API client for each service. I'd also like to get 
some semantics into the data to allow developers to use their 
own vocabulary within their bounded context, but use a common 
ontology where they communicate. Semantics should also protect 
us against problems like renaming fields, which can be a pain.

We've invested quite a bit in describing our data using JSON 
schema, so I'm interested to see if/how we can use existing 
schemata alongside Hydra and JSON-LD. I've already seen a 
discussion along those lines on the email list.

Well, that's all from me for now. I'm sure I'll be in touch as I 
narrow in on particular issues.

All the best,
Ross McFarlane
@rossmcf

Received on Monday, 20 April 2015 06:17:25 UTC