HATEOAS (Hypermedia As The Engine Of Application State) is an essential part of REST. The application state part leads some to explain REST and HATEOAS using state machines. While this is technically correct, I really don’t like the idea of explaining REST as a state machine. People’s eyes glaze over immediately when you merely say state machine. The argument roughly goes like this:
If you’ve been following along so far, you’ll note that REST is not HTTP. It is also not the verbs of HTTP (GET, PUT, POST, or DELETE). You should know by now that REST contains the principles that guided HTTP. REST helped the HTTP standard describe how a well defined web server should behave…
Previously, we talked about the role of properties when evaluating architectures for network-based applications. We also talked about the paper’s working definition of architectural elements such as components along with the requirements of the web. Now we will use that knowledge to understand the paper’s definition of REST architecture as a set of constraints…