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0 pointslmm11y ago0 comments

HATEOAS only lets you discover something by going there, so to speak; it doesn't give you a complete index like a WSDL.

At the transport level you get much richer and more structured client code from SOAP. Automated HATEOAS clients are at this point purely theoretical, and anything you could put a content-type on and send over HATEOAS you could equally embed in a SOAP response. If the thing you wanted to embed can be expressed as XML, you can do much better.

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6 comments · 2 top-level

lmorchard11y ago· 2 in thread

Your browser is an "automated HATEOAS client". You can toss it any old HTML doc and it knows what to do with things described in the HTML content-type spec such as links, forms, images, scripts, etc.

lmmOP11y ago

No, the browser is very much a manual HATEOAS client.

jalfresi11y ago

Incorrect. When you view a html page, the browser fetches the javascript, css and images in the page automatically.

dragonwriter11y ago· 2 in thread

> HATEOAS only lets you discover something by going there, so to speak; it doesn't give you a complete index like a WSDL.

HATEOAS doesn't inherently require that you "go" anywhere to get a hypertext document describing an API, and can be as complete as you want. But, since its really designed for web-scale decentralized interlinked APIs, no, its not primarily intended to have one document that gives you every possible linked endpoint.

> Automated HATEOAS clients are at this point purely theoretical

Googlebot is an example of an automated HATEOAS client that handles a wide array of content types. It is decidedly not purely theoretical.

lmmOP11y ago

Googlebot is not an automated HATEOAS client, it's solely an automated web client. Even if the web conformed to all the specifications it would still be an exceedingly atypical example of a HATEOAS API. And googlebot is nowhere near the reliability level that we would require for most use cases.

dragonwriter11y ago

> Even if the web conformed to all the specifications it would still be an exceedingly atypical example of a HATEOAS API.

The HTTP-powered Web is the prototypical REST (including the HATEOAS constraint that is part of the definintion of REST) API.

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