Use Hypermedia as the engine of application state.
Hypermedia as the engine of application state.
Hypermedia as the engine of application state(HATEOAS hereafter)-
Hypermedia is a media type which can contain hyperlinks.
There are many machine readable XML and JSON Hypermedia formats, just a short list of them:.
Accidental Occurrence will be sold as a Hypermedia art piece to museums, cultural institutions, and/or collectors.
To be RESTful a Service needs to fulfill the Hypermedia as the Engine of Application State.
A lot of these answers entirely forgot to mention Hypermedia controls(HATEOAS) which is completely fundamental to REST.
This was historic as it marked a new
beginning of the World Wide Web where Hypermedia information can be easily accessed.
By the web we follow links- described by a Hypermedia format(usually HTML)-
to achieve a goal, instead of typing the URLs into the addres bar.
By machines we have to add
semantics to the links with RDF(by JSON-LD with Hydra) or with Hypermedia specific solutions(for example IANA link relations
and vendor specific MIME types by HAL+JSON).
Nowadays we are talking about Web APIs and Hypermedia APIs, because the most of the so called REST applications
did not fulfill the HATEOAS part of the uniform interface constraint.
In 1992, author Ted Nelson- who coined both terms in 1963- wrote: By now the word"hypertext" has become generally accepted for branching and responding text,
but the corresponding word"Hypermedia", meaning complexes of branching and responding graphics,
movies and sound- as well as text- is much less used.