Should my API be RESTful?
I n the preceding section, I mentioned that our API will not be RESTful; let me explain why. While almost all constraints of REST make sense for modern APIs, HATEOAS does not.
Roy Fielding outlined the REST constraints in his doctoral dissertation paper titled Architectural Styles and the Design of Network-based Software Architectures, which you can access at www.ics.uci.edu/~fielding/pubs/dissertation/top.htm. This was back in the year 2000, before search engines such as Yahoo!, Lycos, Infoseek, AltaVista, Ask Jeeves, and Google became prominent. The HATEOAS constraint made sense then, as it allows website visitors to use the list of links to navigate from any one page to any other page.
However, the HATEOAS constraint ...
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