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Am I the only one who has trouble sifting through all this marketing? Even "read more" link leads to an article where half of the text promises what will be cov
by annnnd 13y ago
Am I the only one who has trouble sifting through all this marketing? Even "read more" link leads to an article where half of the text promises what will be covered and another half talks about some subscriptions and how they are managed (they might have been mentioned in the first half, I agree - and I also read text only twice).
If someone has a better understanding of how this works, I would appreciate a TL;DR version for programmers (which are probably the target audience?). Thanks!
- mcantrell 13y agoHere's my basic understanding of it: This sounds like webhooks, but they have a set payload, so that the server that is sent the webhook just calls the rest endpoint it is given in the payload.
- carrja99 13y agoBasically we're taking webhooks and adding a RESTful subscription layer to it. This way users don't have to go copy and past webhook urls into other applications... the applications they use automatically create and destroy the subscriptions for them.
- afandian 13y agoAgreed. I came here to ask if anyone actually understood anything about the product from the front page.
- bryanh 13y agoWe are pushing some copy updates to the homepage, most of the technical details were in docs. TL;DR coming to the homepage soon, but the gist is: REST Hooks itself is not a specification, it is a collection of patterns that treat webhooks like subscriptions. These subscriptions are manipulated via a REST API just like any other resource. That's it. Really. Thanks for the feedback!
- neilk 13y agoBetter. That's practically the only thing that needs to be on the home page. You also need to explain who you are and why you're doing this, too. Right now it looks like you have an interest in selling something but you never explain what it is. It reminds me a lot of those sites which sell some miracle product, and are deliberately very long and vague, and it ends finally with some button to order an ebook or something.
- yajoe 13y agoAt the bottom of the page I saw: > An initiative by Zapier 2013. Zapier is a company that makes money off sites having REST endpoints to push and pull data. It looks like Zapier would prefer that more sites have endpoints to accept push, and this marketing effort is a brand-campaign (think Public Service Announcement) to get more people to tailor their products to work with Zapier. That explains why more emphasis was put on marketing, etc. The primary audience is not developers but PHBs and PMs to have sound bytes to parrot to developers. (I'm not cynical, I work in advertising, most of my products already have 'REST hooks'...)
- bryanh 13y agoBingo!
- jqueryin 13y agoAs I read through the website, I felt mislead by the title "REST Hooks - Stop the polling madness" in that I believed we were talking directly about reducing something like AJAX long polling for an alternative means of retrieving data from the backend. Having felt that pain before, and not opting for WebSockets yet, I was hoping for some kind of simple alternative. I have a portion of code that occurs during a registration process that is currently polling the backend for status updates as to the worker queue's progress (it's a lengthy registration with several moving pieces and calls to multiple remote APIs).
- IanCal 13y ago
- spdy 13y agoSame for me i miss the How? part. And i got oversold on an idea that sounds good but i have no clue how it works. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Webhook http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Webhook
- joeblau 13y agoYou are not the only one. I read though it, clicked around, looked at the demos, thought about bookmarking it, got to the documentation page and saw this `/api/v1/subscription/`, thought That breaks HATEOAS then left. I'm sure if I put more time into trying to understand what is going on I could figure it out, but to me, the message isn't that clear.
- Kiro 13y agoHow does it break HATEOAS?
- sopooneo 13y agoPeople argue that, with REST, versioning should be done in headers and not the url. Maybe that?
- steveklabnik 13y agoNooe, HATEOAS is about links. The official-sounding thing that this would violate is the "server should be able to organize its own namespace." That said, I don't think this actually mandates any URLs. I read that part as just a suggestion for how it could be done.
- sopooneo 13y agoDoes that mean it should be possible to just have the link be "subscription"?
- steveklabnik 13y agoIt means that the spec shouldn't specify URIs, and instead publish link relations. (I'm not saying that I think it should be that way, just elaborating.)
- dscrd 13y agoI'm interested since my application publishes URLs just like that. What's wrong with it as far as HATEOAS is considered? How would it be better?
- pbreit 13y agoYeah, it's pretty bad. I think it comes down to "assuming WebHooks, a suggested 'pattern' to set up the subscription programmatically".
- mmgutz 13y agoAgree with you. If the audience is developers, give it to us in black in white instead of some new jargon and marketing blah. I looked through several pages (waste of time) and I still can't figure out how this is real time without websockets, polling, server side events. No way I would use this service if they don't know who their audience is.
- nilliams 13y agoYep the missing part of the description is 'server-to-server', or 'client-with-a-listen-port (i.e. not a browser) to server'. Unfortunately a lot of us developers see the term REST API and think a-ha, this is something I can consume in my browser. This isn't that, so confusion ensues.
- crystaln 13y agoAnd here I thought I was being dense. Seems like it adds data that would normally be included in a poll response to requests that were going to be made anyway, and possibly adds requests that were normally going to be made independently to long polls, though I'm not sure about any of this. If I am right, would be nice to explain this and how it compensates if there is not a "regular" request within a certain period of time. And well, to basically explain WTH REST hooks are.... Is the most important piece of information really: "REST Hooks itself is not a specification, it is a collection of patterns that treat webhooks like subscriptions"? That seems of tertiary importance at best. How about telling us what REST Hooks are and how they are that - not what they aren't from a marketing perspective. This is targeting a technical audience. It shouldn't so drastically underestimate its readers.