FOSSMeet is an annual conference held by the FOSS Cell of National Institute of Technology - Calicut, Kozhikode. This year I got the opportunity to speak at this prestigious conference, a first for me. The talk was on an interesting development in the Web Technologies sphere, especially relating to the field of APIs. Here is a basic overview of what I covered and a few points I’d like to express over here.
What’s wrong with the APIs of now?
Application Programming Interfaces are all the rage within the modern world of micro-services and IoT. We live in a world where there are APIs that do vairous tasks, be it an NLP service that summarises or even those that provide images of random cuteness to fill up your website.
While the API world is headed into the era of IoT, we must take into consideration the vast capabilities that are not still tapped.
What is hydra and why be interested?
Hydra stands for Hypermedia driven APIs and as the name states, it simplifies the development of interoperable, hypermedia-driven Web APIs.
It tries to build APIs such that they can be easily used with generic, or as I like to call them, ‘API agnostic’ clients. Hydra also deals with building these generic clients.
If that was not clear enough, let me state that the main goal with Hydra is to bring about specifications such that there is almost no dependence on Human readable documentation and reference sources or so called ‘API SDKs’ in the process of building the client for an API.
Client breaking APIs, gone?
To a certain degree, we will see the age of API clients that break due to innocuous reasons such as improper structuring pass. The whole of an API written, keeping to the Hydra standards, will be extremely modular. This is good for IoT devices, where the process of upgrading all members of a network is almost impossible due to sheer numbers.
With Hydra, the onus of understanding the context is on the the client, and not much on the provider. Unlike nowadays, where the complete knowledge circle is internalized under the API providers discretion and all the client get’s to do is make calls.
Also, with the advent of linked data and knowledge graphs, it is intuitive to think in terms.
Why talk at FOSSMeet?
There are many reasons that can be attributed to the choice of topic made for this talk. First and foremost, I would like to address the fact that I am noob when it comes to APIs, I’ve not worked much with them(fact: I learnt about APIs mostly by observing a few friends work on a project). This might as well be my first real venture into the field of web technologies that are not front-end oriented.
Secondly, I am trying out for GSoC’19 and one of the organisations I came to short-list are working on making an implementation of the Hydra specification. When I made the decision I intended to learn enough about the Hydra specification that I could master most of the important points. Hopefully this works out.