Reading through the first few pages of the book, I was astonished at how little I know about the early web. How I really had no idea of what REST actually meant. I considered myself to be quite aware of a lot of things, but this was a rude awakening to the contrary. It might sound like I am disheartened, quite the contrary. I am glad, I decided to finally sit down and read through the history of hypermedia. I feel empowered, all these years of writing SPA's and wondering, why does it need to so complicated and error prone? I thought it was just a skill issue, especially with the internet seeming so confident with everything. This was a relief.
Components that make up hypermedia
This was interesting, understanding what comprises a hypermedia system. How there is so much more to hypermedia than HTML. Understanding, why I was annoyed of HTML, because when developing web apps the SPA way, it gets in the way. You have this tool in the form of JavaScript, which you rely on so much that it seems like, if only HTML were better, then my life would be easier, or better yet if I did not have to bother about this clunky tool called HTML, which seemed archaic compared to what JavaScript was capable of.
REST: It is not what I thought it was!
When I thought of REST, my mind went to API's that returned JSON objects, in fact the word API is almost used together with REST. REpresentational State Transfer turns out was meant as a network architecture. It also, turns out that in the 90's it was meant as a way for browsers to exchange hypermedia.
HATEOAS
Client side state management is hard, why is it though? Simple, we have a source of truth, the server. Trying to make the client reflect this truth, is not easy. There is a simpler approach, just don't. Use HTTP to send you the representation of this truth in the form of HTML. This was one of the first benefits I noticed as I was building ioignition, not having to maintain any state on the client, is so much more easier.
