Hydra is an effort to simplify the development of interoperable, hypermedia-driven Web APIs. The two fundamental
building blocks of Hydra are JSON‑LD and the
Hydra Core Vocabulary.
JSON‑LD is the serialization format used in the communication between the server and its clients. The
Hydra Core Vocabulary represents the shared vocabulary between them. By specifying a number of concepts which are
commonly used in Web APIs it can be used as the foundation to build Web services that share REST's benefits in
terms of loose coupling, maintainability, evolvability, and scalability. Furthermore it enables the creation of
generic API clients instead of requiring specialized clients for every single API.
Specifications
Playground
There exists a demo Web API featuring a simple event management API which allows you to try Hydra directly in your web
browser:
Launch Hydra Console
There also exists a demo featuring an issue tracker.
Of course, the complete source code of the Hydra Event API as well as the
Hydra Issue Tracker Demo application is available. You can use
them as skeletons for your own APIs.
Collaborating
Join the Hydra W3C Community Group
(you need a W3C account to do so).
If you just want to report a bug, either raise an issue on our
issue tracker, submit a pull
request, or send a mail to
Hydra's public mailing list.
Source Code
The Hydra project currently consists of the following parts:
- HydraBundle: a bundle for
Symfony2 to create Web APIs based on Hydra
- HydraConsole: a generic API console for Hydra-powered Web
APIs
- HydraClient: a PHP client library to access Hydra-powered Web
APIs
- JsonLD: a JSON-LD processor implemented in PHP
Publications/Presentations
- M. Lanthaler,
“Full-on Hypermedia APIs with Hydra,”
presented at the API Strategy & Practice Conference.
- C. Pautasso, E. Wilde, and R. Alarcon (editors),
“REST: Advanced Research Topics and Practical Applications,”
Springer New York, 2014.
- L. Richardson, M. Amundsen, and S. Ruby,
“RESTful Web APIs,” O’Reilly Media, 2013.
- M. Lanthaler,
“Building Next-Generation Web APIs with JSON-LD and Hydra,”
presented at the Symfony Live Portland 2013 [slides]
[video].
- M. Lanthaler and C. Gütl,
“Hydra: A Vocabulary for Hypermedia-Driven Web APIs,”
in Proceedings of the 6th Workshop on Linked Data on the Web (LDOW2013) at the 22nd International
World Wide Web Conference (WWW2013), 2013 [slides].
- M. Lanthaler, “Creating 3rd Generation Web APIs with Hydra,”
in Proceedings of the 22nd International World Wide Web Conference (WWW2013), 2013, pp. 35–37
[slides].
- M. Lanthaler and C. Gütl,
“Model Your Application Domain, Not Your JSON Structures,”
in Proceedings of the 4th International Workshop on RESTful Design (WS-REST 2013) at the
22nd International World Wide Web Conference (WWW2013), 2013, pp. 1415–1420
[slides].