Blog post on REST API media types... and Mason wins!

[Curtis Farnham]

Hey everyone.  My employer has finally gotten my initial REST API work launched into Production, with more coming very shortly.  With this, they asked me to write up an article for our tech blog on why we chose Mason for our media type.  I thought you might enjoy it:

https://www.phone.com/blog/learning/2015/10/08/selecting-data-type-for-restful-api/

Cheers!

-Curtis Farnham

[Martin Bayly]

Enjoyed your blog post.  Been going through a similar analysis process for a new project and your main concerns about the alternative (to Mason) hypermedia types are uncannily similar to my own concerns.
Mason is last on my list to look at, but from glancing through the intro page on github, it looks very interesting.

Three more months have passed since your blog post. Are you still as happy with your decision?

I plan on digging into Mason a bit more.  My main concern with Mason is still that it is such a small player as Jorn himself admits.

Cheers

Martin

[Curtis Farnham]

Thanks Martin.  Interesting that I'm not the only one coming to these conclusions about the different media types out here.

Yes, we are still very happy with our choice of Mason.  Yes, we also wish it was more popular, but we are still willing to go with it anyway. We are also open-sourcing some code that will help promote Mason within the PHP community.  We have released 2 projects - mason-php and mason-laravel, both of which are libraries that help generate Mason documents and HTTP responses.  We are also exploring making a Javascript-based generic Mason browser, along the lines the .NET one that Jorn built.  I'll announce it here if/when we release it.

-Curtis

[Martin Bayly]

Yeah, great idea about making a JavaScript-based generic browser.  I had similar thoughts myself if we decided to go down the Mason route.  I started a separate topic to ask others why they adopted Mason, but as I started looking into it last night, I wondered if the current .NET based browser could be 'just one more thing' hurting adoption, as many people might be put off about having to download and install something.  Viewing a generic browser really brings the ideas behind an API to life and so I'm sure helps adoption.

Martin

[Kijana Woodard]

Fwiw, as a .net developer, I was put off by downloading a .net based client.

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[Jørn Wildt]

Yeah, I know, but that is where my expertise lies. I wouldn't know where to start with a JS based client. If anyone decides to take a stab at such a thing that would be great.

Even just sketching out something or indicating a feasible route would be a help :-)

/Jørn

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/Jørn

[Curtis Farnham]

My company is already building that Javascript-based browser I mentioned.  It's in early alpha right now.  We were planning to hold off releasing it until it's ready for beta testing.  Hopefully the next week or two will see a lot of progress. Stay tuned! ;-)

The plan is that it will be a single HTML and jQuery page (no PHP or any backend language) and it will pull all of its JS and CSS dependencies in via public CDNs.  This way its footprint will be a single .html file, so it remains extremely portable.

-Curtis

[Jørn Wildt]

Very cool indeed!