Call for Participation in Hydra Community Group

The Hydra Community Group has been launched:

Creating truly RESTful Web APIs is still more an art than a science. Developers have to struggle with a number of complex design decisions because concrete guidelines and processes are missing. Consequently, often it is decided to implement the simplest solution which is, most of the time, to rely on out-of-band contracts between the client and the server. Instead of properly modeling the application domain, all the effort is put in the design of proprietary JSON structures and URLs. This then forms the base for the contract which is communicated in natural-language (with all its ambiguity) to client developers.

Hydra is an attempt to make such contracts machine-readable by defining a small vocabulary that can be used to describe Web APIs. In combination with JSON-LD, an upcoming W3C standard, it is possible create self-descriptive, hypermedia-driven Web APIs which fully leverage Linked Data’s expressivity with REST’s benefits in terms of loose coupling, evolvability, and scalability. More information about Hydra and a simple demo can be found at http://purl.org/hydra/

The goal of this group is to advance the development of Hydra (which includes changing things) and to build rich tooling supporting the creation of Web APIs using Hydra and clients accessing them.

In order to join the group, you will need a W3C account.

This is a community initiative. This group was originally proposed on 2013-06-16 by Markus Lanthaler. The following people supported its creation: Markus Lanthaler, Ruben Verborgh, Mike Amundsen, Ioseb Dzmanashvili, Icaro Medeiros. W3C’s hosting of this group does not imply endorsement of its activities.

If you believe that there is an issue with this group that requires the attention of the W3C staff, please send us email on site-comments@w3.org

Thank you,
W3C Community Development Team