RESTful Web API Patterns and Practices Cookbook

Chapter 2. Thinking and Designing in Hypermedia

There are no separate systems. The world is a continuum. Where to draw a boundary around a system depends on the purpose of the discussion.

Donella H. Meadows

Before diving into the recipes in Part II of this book, it’s worth spending some time digging into the roots of the web and the ideas behind its design. To that end, this chapter highlights some of the important concepts and technical milestones of network computing. These achievements helped shape the way we interact on the web today and, in some ways, the way we think about computing in general.

When thinking about programming the network, often the focus is on what it takes to program a machine. Things like the programming language, use of memory, data storage, and passing properties back and forth through functions are seen as the primary tools. However, when it comes to programming the network, new challenges appear, and that means we need new thinking and new tooling, too.

In the following sections, you’ll find some historical materials as well as commentary on their application to today’s attempts to move beyond stateful, local programming models. In “Establishing a Foundation with Hypermedia Designs”, you’ll find the ideas behind the design recipes in this book, including:

• How to establish common communication between machines first discussed in the early 1960s

• The notion of information architecture from the 1990s

• The application of hypermedia as ...