REST, HATEOAS

Another (ugly) acronym:

HATEOAS - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

HATEOAS, an abbreviation for Hypermedia as the Engine of Application State, is a constraint of the REST application architecture that distinguishes it from most other network application architectures. The principle is that a client interacts with a network application entirely through hypermedia provided dynamically by application servers. A REST client needs no prior knowledge about how to interact with any particular application or server beyond a generic understanding of hypermedia. In aservice-oriented architecture (SOA), clients and servers interact through a fixed interface shared through documentation or aninterface description language (IDL).

RESTful service can be described as well to be available for the client code-generation, RSDL (RESTful Service Description Language) using dynamic metadata collection to achieve this goal.

The HATEOAS constraint serves to decouple client and server in a way that allows the server to evolve functionality independently.


REST APIs must be hypertext-driven » Untangled
(by inventor of REST, and co-author of HTTP)

if the engine of application state (and hence the API) is not being driven by hypertext, then it cannot be RESTful and cannot be a REST API. Period.