Creating hypermedia reactively

At the beginning of this chapter, we crafted a very simple API. It served some pretty basic JSON content. One thing that was missing from such a bare API was any controls.

Hypermedia is the term used to refer to both content and metadata being served by an API; this content and metadata indicate what can be done with the data or how to find other related data.

Hypermedia is something we see every day. At least on web pages. This includes the navigation links to other pages, links to CSS stylesheets, and links to effect change. This is quite common. When we order some product from Amazon, we aren’t required to provide the link to make it happen. The web page gives it to us.

Hypermedia in JSON is simply the same concept but applied to APIs instead of visual web pages.

And this is easy if we add Spring HATEOAS to our application!

Spring Boot Starter HATEOAS versus Spring HATEOAS

If you go to start.spring.io and ask for Spring HATEOAS...