Is HAL+JSON dead?

[Matthew Madson]

The website seems to be down, returning 404:

http://stateless.co/hal_specification.html

This was reported to the github as an issue way back in April, so I assume the website has been down since April?

https://github.com/mikekelly/hal_specification/issues/29

And the latest draft of the spec is set to expire in roughly a month.

https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-kelly-json-hal-08

So... is HAL dead, which hypermedia json format seems to have the most backing these days?

Thanks!

[Kevin Swiber]

In short: No.  HAL is not dead.  It was never alive.  It's just a format.  Even if no one's using it, you should use it if you find value.

I'm not sure what you mean by "most backing."  No hypermedia format comes close to plain ol' application/json in terms of adoption.

But in our beautiful hypermedia world, I hear about HAL all the time.  It's probably the most known format, and it's certainly easy to adopt  Then I hear about Siren (because I wrote it) and JSON-LD/Hydra (because that's a good competitor to Siren).

Overall, hypermedia usage appears to be going up.  I'm seeing more and more enterprises adopt it.  In my limited world view, I see people moving to Siren and JSON-LD more than HAL.  Again, that's because I only see a narrow slice.

So again, if HAL works for you, use it!  You have nothing to worry about.  There are plenty of open source libraries that support it.

Cheers from the underground,

Kevin

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[Matthew Madson]

Thanks for the response Kevin. Just to clarify, I find value in designing hypermedia apis, I have a few apis that have adopted hal+json despite limited framework support (I'm basically rolling my own at this point). I'm hoping to continue to design hypermedia apis but I'd like to choose a format that many other companies and individuals are using, so that I can reap the rewards of an active community which will likely develop sophisticated tooling and framework support. If HAL is not headed in that direction, I was curious which formats if any are. Seems like you've identified Siren and JSON-LD as a few alternatives. I'll definitely take a look, thanks again!

[Tim Lytle]

For what it's worth, I believe the site was working this week. So not down since April.

[Kin Lane]

I <3 your response Kevin!!

--Kin Lane