RESTful Java Web Services - Third Edition

Hypermedia as the Engine of Application State

Hypermedia as the Engine of Application State (HATEOAS) is an important principle of the REST application architecture. The principle is that the model of application changes from one state to another by traversing the hyperlinks present in the current set of resource representations (model). Let's learn this principle in detail.

In a RESTful system, there is no fixed interface between the client and the server, as you may see in a conventional client-server communication model such as Common Object Request Broker Architecture (CORBA) and Java Remote Method Invocation (Java RMI). With REST, the client just needs to know how to deal with the hypermedia links present in the response body; next, ...