REST (json) web service discovery protocol

Question

Is there any json-only standard to handle resource discovery (ie. collections of editable entries) ?

I mean some "protocol" to use in a self-describing REST service, eventually with hypermedia discovery (read, links and paging)

What about some Atom Publishing Protocol json equivalent ?

Markus Lanthaler · Answer 1 · 2013-08-30T10:19:04.650

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Perhaps you should have a look at Hydra (which works with JSON-LD). If you find it interesting, there's a Hydra W3C Community Group you may wanna join.

Here's the recording of a talk in which I describe both Hydra and JSON-LD: Building Next-Generation Web APIs with JSON-LD and Hydra

Disclaimer: I'm the creator of Hydra and the chair of the Hydra CG. I'm also one of the core designers of JSON-LD and a co-author and editor of its specifications.

edited Aug 30 '13 at 10:19

answered Aug 30 '13 at 10:13

Markus Lanthaler

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Can you summarize, *in your answer,* the benefits that Hydra provides? – Robert Harvey May 08 '15 at 15:43

score 5 · Answer 2 · answered Nov 01 '11 at 09:36

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Maybe you can use something like this: http://restdesc.org/

answered Nov 01 '11 at 09:36

Venne

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looks interesting but very poorly documented – gpilotino Nov 23 '11 at 09:53

score 2 · Answer 3 · answered Jan 03 '12 at 03:04

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Maybe you could take a look at JSON-LD: http://json-ld.org/

answered Jan 03 '12 at 03:04

Andrej Eisfeld

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score -1 · Answer 4 · answered Aug 09 '11 at 09:40

A protocol? The whole point of REST is that you just ask a resource for a representation that happens to contain links to other resources. Pretty much any resource can tell you about other resources that happen to be relevant. There isn't a protocol specifically for discovery precisely because discovery is built into the whole architecture.

Some RESTful services publish service descriptions in a format like WADL, which could allow a client to predict the URIs for the some of the sorts of resources that the service provides. But that's not a substitute for actually getting links from other resources published by the service, as those links are concrete whereas WADL talks about URI templates.

The question is about a standard/consolidated technology (vs a custom solution) to "put discovery into the whole architecture", ie. links representation. WADL is XML and does not provide content but only the service description. AtomPub instead does transport content __with__ its (meta) description, moreover it handles hypermedia (but is still XML :) — gpilotino, Aug 09 '11 at 09:49

REST (json) web service discovery protocol

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