I restarted this topic on the API-Craft google group and got some great responses.
The main advantages of the Array design are:
- multiple links for the same relationship
- multiple relationships for the same link without writing the link aggain
- the ability to order the links
The map of cause has better accessibility.
As far as structure goes there are a lot of possibilities:
- JSON-HAL: http://blog.stateless.co/post/13296666138/json-linking-with-hal or also http://stateless.co/hal_specification.html
- JSON-LD: http://json-ld.org/ (optionally using Hydra vocabulary)
- JSON-Schema: http://json-schema.org/ (theHyper Meta-Schema on the bottom of the page)
- Collection+JSON: http://amundsen.com/media-types/collection/
I guess i will go with HAL as it is the cleanest solution, the rest all look kind of… strange for json.