(4) About Me

• Ph.D. in Communications Systems [http://dret.net/netdret/publications#wil97b] from ETH Zürich [http://www.ethz.ch/]
• Working on Web Architecture after writing the first Web Technology book (1998) [http://dret.net/netdret/publications#wil98]
• UC Berkeley (2006-2011), working on Service Models for Open Government [http://dret.net/netdret/publications#wil09g]
• EMC (2011-2014), working on transforming software products into service platforms
• Siemens (2014-2015), working on using IoT to build WoT (APIs for Things)
• Joined CA [http://www.ca.com/]'s API Academy [http://www.apiacademy.co/] in 2016 and now all about API Strategy and Design
• Active in the usual places such as Twitter [http://twitter.com/dret], GitHub [http://github.com/dret], my blog [http://dret.typepad.com/dretblog/], LinkedIn [http://www.linkedin.com/in/netdret], and flickr [https://www.flickr.com/photos/dret/]

(5) API Academy [http://www.apiacademy.co/]

• Global Team working on API Strategy and Design topics
  • Matt McLarty [http://www.apiacademy.co/team_member/matt-mclarty/] (Vancouver)
  • Mike Amundsen [http://www.apiacademy.co/team_member/mike-amundsen/] (Cincinnati)
  • Ronnie Mitra [http://www.apiacademy.co/team_member/ronnie-mitra/] (London)
  • Erik Wilde [http://www.apiacademy.co/team_member/erik-wilde/] (Zürich/Berkeley)
• Evangelizing ideas and technologies
  • Speaking (conferences, events)
  • Teaching (workshops, bootcamps)
  • Publishing (blogs, articles, books, podcasts [https://soundcloud.com/user-426834320])
  • Doing (side projects on API-related topics)
  • Standardizing (participating in specification work)

(7) Web Linking Changes

• PSA: Web Linking is under revision
  • RFC 5988 [https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc5988] has been around for almost 7 years
  • draft-nottingham-rfc5988bis [https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-nottingham-rfc5988bis] will replace RFC 5988 very soon
• No major changes to the existing specification
  • No more Link Relation Application Data Registry
  • Many tweaks and clarifications of the existing model [https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-nottingham-rfc5988bis#appendix-C]

(8) Links as Resources

• Scenario 1: Third-Party Links
  • Better support for service orchestration (LaaS)
• Scenario 2: Challenges Writing to HTTP Header Field
  • Applications may have challenges serializing links in header fields
• Scenario 3: Large Number of Links
  • HTTP header fields are constrained in size and should not be too big
  • Link resources enable link-oriented features such as paging and searching

(9) Linkset Design

• Native and JSON representation of Web Links
  • Native is the HTTP Link header field syntax
  • JSON is based on native but easier to process with a standard JSON toolset
• Unconstrained representation of Web Links
  • Any Web Link data can be represented in both syntaxes
• Schema-agnostic representation of Web Links
  • No schema knowledge about non-standard target attributes is required

(10) Linkset Media Types

• Native representation based on the HTTP Link header field syntax
  • Requires specialized parsing
  • Requires character escaping for non-ASCII characters
• JSON representation uses JSON to encode the native information model
  • Can be processed with any JSON toolset
  • Requires some transcoding for non-ASCII characters

[ { "href"   : "http://example.com/foo", 
    "rel   " : [ "next" ] } ]

[ { "href"   : "http://example.com/foo",
    "rel"    : [ "next" ],
    "title"  : "naechstes Kapitel",
    "title*" : [ [ "nächstes Kapitel", "de" ] ],
    "foo"    : [ "foovalue" ],
    "bar"    : [ "barone", "bartwo" ] } ]

(11) Check and Comment

• Check out the current Linkset Internet Draft [https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-wilde-linkset]
  1. application/linkset media type for the native representation
  2. application/linkset+json media type for the JSON representation
  3. linkset link relation for linking to link sets
• Did we miss any interesting use cases?
  • Affordances without data! That's odd… or maybe useful?
  • Is there a typical data/control ratio in REST design?

(13) Thanks! Q&A

• Slides online: dret.net/lectures/restfest-2017 [http://dret.net/lectures/restfest-2017]
• Slide sources: dret/lectures [http://github.com/dret/lectures/tree/master/restfest-2017] on GitHub [http://github.com/]
• Me: http://dret.net/netdret/ [http://dret.net/netdret/]
• Twitter: @dret [http://twitter.com/dret]