1. HATEOAS APIS
Matt Bishop, Product Architect at Elastic Path
@MattBishopL3

2. Growth of APIs, How Exciting!
www.elasticpath.com @MattBishopL3

3.  Actually, it’s more like 14,000
 1 minute per API = 6 weeks end-to-end
www.elasticpath.com @MattBishopL3

4. REST beats SOAP, How
Exciting!
www.elasticpath.com @MattBishopL3

5. Growth of Internet Hostnames
www.elasticpath.com @MattBishopL3

6. What happened in the 90s?
 1989 HTML invented (thanks Tim!)
 1992 First browsers built
 1994 Netscape launched
 1995 Internet Explorer in Win95, IIS bundled in
NT, Apache, PHP released
www.elasticpath.com @MattBishopL3

7. Internet Host Names In A Line
www.elasticpath.com @MattBishopL3

8. Make a Website, 1995-style
 Web sites were coded in:
• Java
• C / C++
• Perl
• ColdFusion
• Python
www.elasticpath.com @MattBishopL3

9. Templates Blew the Doors off the
Internet
 Late 90s Microsoft ASP, Apache JSP,
DreamWeaver, Velocity, etc.
 Templates opened internet development to the
common man
 Templates made data BROWSABLE
www.elasticpath.com @MattBishopL3

10. Templates made data browsable
 Made linking easy
 <asp:HyperLink …
 <a href=“<%= getLink
(somedata) %>
 Easy linking means
easy browsability
 Drives the Network
Effect
www.elasticpath.com @MattBishopL3

11. APIs are stuck in the 80s
 …1987, to be exact (28,174 hosts)
 APIs must be browsable before they can be
adopted by 100m organizations
 100m organizations == your sister’s dress
store, my mom’s knitting club
www.elasticpath.com @MattBishopL3

12. Comfortably Numb
We can stay stuck here if we
don’t link our resources
together
www.elasticpath.com @MattBishopL3

13. Links are about Relationships
 Relationships are hard
www.elasticpath.com @MattBishopL3

16. Relationships are not hard after
all
• Relationships are a fundamental part of being
an animal
www.elasticpath.com @MattBishopL3

17. Relationships make Versionless
APIs possible
 Relationships are very stable
 The resources themselves move, but their
relationships do not
 GET /profiles/id
• “addresses”: “/profiles/id/addresses”
? Hmm maybe addresses should be their own
resource ?
GET /profiles/id
• “addresses”: “/addresses”
www.elasticpath.com @MattBishopL3

18. Relationships make APIs
browsable
 Browsable APIs == Browsable data == mass
adoption
 First step is to make it easy to link
www.elasticpath.com @MattBishopL3

19. Cortex API Engine
 Elastic Path’s API endeavors have failed four
times
 2010 drank the HATEOAS Kool-Aid, reset our API
effort
 Found no frameworks to help past URI-to-method
mapping and ser/deser
 We built an engine using some existing
technology (Jax-RS, Spring, Shiro) and our own
work
 Cortex is an API engine that happens to run
www.elasticpath.com @MattBishopL3

20. Cortex Design Philosophy
• Small, simple resources written by BAs
• Small, simple state changes via controls
• Form
• Selector
• “Secret Admirer” rule
• All Operations are identified
• REST is the Gestalt, HTTP is a transport
www.elasticpath.com @MattBishopL3