There are some libraries, expect more to spring up soon.
> How does this affect performance?
This kind of question is incredibly broad. In ways it's more efficient, in ways it's less. It Depends.
That said, as you alluded to, caching should be very prevalent, so that helps.
Also, it's not like you have to make 5 requests any time you want to do anything: the point is that you follow the application's state along. Just one request per transition. A maze is a pretty decent analogy, actually...
> harder to learn than an ad hoc fiat standard
They may _seem_ harder to learn, but you have to re-learn every single ad-hoc standard over and over and over and over. If you learn HAL, you can speak to any number of APIs that use HAL. Plus, you say 'complexity,' I say, 'no surprises.' Everything is actually enumerated for you, so it should be easier to learn. No hidden assumptions.
Furthermore, as you're more familiar with the format, the details fade into the background. I'm sure you don't read RFC 4627 every time you want to deal with a JSON-based API, either.
> Python?
There are some libraries, expect more to spring up soon.
> How does this affect performance?
This kind of question is incredibly broad. In ways it's more efficient, in ways it's less. It Depends.
That said, as you alluded to, caching should be very prevalent, so that helps.
Also, it's not like you have to make 5 requests any time you want to do anything: the point is that you follow the application's state along. Just one request per transition. A maze is a pretty decent analogy, actually...
> harder to learn than an ad hoc fiat standard
They may _seem_ harder to learn, but you have to re-learn every single ad-hoc standard over and over and over and over. If you learn HAL, you can speak to any number of APIs that use HAL. Plus, you say 'complexity,' I say, 'no surprises.' Everything is actually enumerated for you, so it should be easier to learn. No hidden assumptions.
Furthermore, as you're more familiar with the format, the details fade into the background. I'm sure you don't read RFC 4627 every time you want to deal with a JSON-based API, either.