RE: moving forward—with a plan

Hi guys,

I am siding this conversation because I am keeping up my interest in
standards for Web APIs and Linked Data while working mostly with REST
principles.

The only problem I see in how things has going on till now is the complete
lack of concern about development, as somebody else noted as well. I think
that, beside keeping relations between active members more constant, the
real need is **to bring on a community-managed development effort** (a test
environment we may say) in parallel with the design one; to benchmark
proposals' effectiveness on real grounds and to have a concrete example to
present to the community. I mean, I got into HYDRA just because I saw what
Markus' PHP test application could do, more on that side is needed!

Practically, it would be great to start a small fund (few euros per member
or a sponsorship) to support the creation of 2-3 VMs in any cloud services
provider where to deploy a complete (moderate scaled) example based on
interesting (open-)data. This way the group would have a "product" to
benchmark improvements and show the community, to attract developers and
implementers of HYDRA. Stuff like live- sandboxed-interactions using a
browser or a command line tool, for example, makes the difference to gather
consensus and feedback.
Just having a Python library that simulate the interaction of an
hypothetical client with a test-server, implement a GUI-editor could be a
start; see about Swagger-OpenAPI and GraphQL for examples, even the most
abstract activity needs a realization to gather support. Ideas need a
design, and a design must bring to possible applications.

I could suggest a cool project (based on randomly generated data from a
science-focused open JSON-LD vocabulary I developed) to use for the purpose
of generating a test-server (but anything else valuable and interesting
could work the same). Other great things could be done by having an
automatic client that hits HYDRA-defined microservices. Just implementing
one of this possible demo applications can relaunch the draft. I have seen
some nice realisations from singles in the mailing list but only a shared
project can change the situation.

Beside stimulating the workflow, something like that would realize a major
bond between design and development, that is actually what makes an
open-source community working. Once the standard is defined and accepted,
it can be kept alive to design and improve future versions. It will also
demonstrate a long-term commitment to become an industry standard. Finally,
get in touch with other rising communities like elixir-lang.org or IOT
startups dev-teams is necessary. Focus on young and promising technologies!
Otherwise I don't see how HYDRA could keep the pace of other technologies.

There are a lot of good ideas in HYDRA but they need to be put into a
community-managed proof-of-concept. Just my two cents.

Have a nice job everybody.

Lorenzo Moriondo, from mobile