HATEOAS: concise description

Question

I am trying to get a clear and concise understanding of HATEOAS, and I am by no means an expert WRT REST. (I think I get it though, thanks to this http://www.looah.com/sourc

Answer 1

One issue with REST & HATEOAS is the difficulty and lack of visibility and control over the interface definition. With more traditional RPC style interaction there was usually an artefact such as an IDL or WSDL that defined the API and could be controlled and managed by the project.

With a HATEOAS the API is dynamically descoverable and it may be described as a set of behaviours (state changes). The behaviours are described in the code. The API description (WADL) is generated from the code rather than code being generated from the interface description.