Building a RESTful Web Service with Spring

API evolutions

Systems evolve over time, and the functionality that they expose changes along with these evolutions. APIs, be it in the form of a library or a RESTful API, must adapt to these changes while maintaining some form of backward compatibility.

It is therefore a good idea to consider evolutions when designing APIs. The next section describes how HATEOAS (Hypermedia As The Engine Of Application State) can be leveraged to manage evolutions.

HATEOAS

This REST principle provides a method for self-discovery for service consumers. Let's consider the following response to a RESTful endpoint:

{
  "id": 1,
  "category": "http://myservice.com/categories/33",
...
}

This response includes a hypermedia link to a related resource, so consumers do not need ...