REST in Practice

Chapter 5. Hypermedia Services

EMBRACING HTTP AS AN APPLICATION PROTOCOL puts the Web at the heart of distributed systems development. But that’s just a start. In this chapter, we will go further, building RESTful services that use hypermedia to model state transitions and describe business protocols.

The Hypermedia Tenet

When browsing the Web, we’re used to navigating between pages by clicking links or completing and submitting forms. Although we may not realize it, these interlinked pages describe a protocol—a series of steps we take to achieve a goal, whether that’s buying books, searching for information, creating a blog post, or even ordering a coffee. This is the very essence of hypermedia: by transiting links between resources, we change the state of an application.

Hypermedia is an everyday part of our online activities, but despite this familiarity, it’s rarely used in computer-to-computer interactions. Although Fielding’s thesis on REST highlighted its role in networked systems, hypermedia has yet to figure significantly in contemporary enterprise solutions.

Hypermedia As the Engine of Application State

The phrase hypermedia as the engine of application state, sometimes abbreviated to HATEOAS, was coined to describe a core tenet of the REST architectural style. In this book, we tend to refer to the hypermedia tenet or just hypermedia. Put simply, the tenet says that hypermedia systems transform application state.

Note

What is application state? If we think of an ...