Hacker News Reader

Comment by mcphage | Hacker News Reader

One of my clients built their API to the jsonapi standard. Then, the standard changed, and it's no longer compliant. Oops.

View on HN

Same issue here. Now so off-track that I'll probably just change the content-type and call it a day.

I'm really sorry that this was your experience. I give a little bit of historical context elsewhere on this thread[1].

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9280602

And that is why any sane (experienced?) API and/or standard author should have versioning in mind at all times. In my experience there is no such thing as "the" API or "the" standard.

Their API is versioned (the json api version happened to be v2). But they don't feel the need to build a brand new v3 just to chase a moving target, especially since customers (and they themselves) are already using their v2.

It's only at RC3 right now. Why would you expect an unstable spec to be static?

There was an unversioned spec posted for months that looked usable, then suddenly they announced a complete rewrite as "RC2". Calling it a relase candidate was misleading, though - almost everything got changed again for "RC3".

I definitely can see why you'd see RC3 as a complete rewrite, but I don't understand why you'd feel that way about RC3. There were definitely changes, but they were much smaller and motivated by significant feedback by users who opened issues in response to RC2.

For example, RC2 mandated that all fields were dasherized. We made field names opaque in RC3.

At this point, we're pretty much nailing down tiny details and included this language with RC3:

    JSON API is at a third release candidate state. This means 
    that it is not yet stable, however, libraries intended to 
    work with 1.0 should implement this version of the 
    specification. We may make very small tweaks, but 
    everything is basically in place.

Release Candidates should already be at a largely stable point, _ready for release_.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_release_life_cycle#Re...

My point is it became an RC3 only a few days ago. If OP used this a year ago it wasn't an RC, just an unstable spec.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com