Headless Drupal and HAL: Lessons Learned

We’ll show you how we designed and engineered a HATEOAS compliant API using Drupal 7, the awesome RESTful module, and a node.js client to interact with it. We’ll dig into this reference implementation and validate which best practices make things easier for the API Clients, and which ones are just hype. Thing’s we’ll discuss:

• What does it mean to be compliant with HATEOAS? What does this even mean?
• If your API is HATEOAS compliant are there libraries your clients can leverage, and what is that development experience like?
• Everything is a resource. Multiple endpoints to represent those resources, and actions attached to them.
• Do hypermedia best practices improve the client coding experience, and pay off long term?
• What API design decisions were the most important for good client coding experiences?
• How do you structure your API to provide compliant responses?
• What API design decisions are just hype and are things you shouldn’t worry about?
• API design tools.