How useful/important is REST HATEOAS ( maturity level 3)?

Question

I\'m getting involved in a project where some senior team members believe that a REST API has to be HATEOAS compliant and implement all Richardson\'s maturity levels (http:/

Answer 1

I have used HATEOAS in some real projects, but with a different interpretation than Richardson. If that is what your bosses want, then I guess you should just do it. I take HATEOAS to mean that your resources should include an HTML doctype, hyperlinks to related resources and HTML forms to expose functionality for verbs other than GET. (This is when the Accept type is text/html - other content types don't require these extras.) I don't know where the belief that all REST resources in your entire application have to be glued together came from. A network application should contain multiple resources that may or may not be directly related. Or why it is believed that XML, JSON and other types need to follow this. (HATEOAS is HTML-specific.)