Relationship and difference between HAL and HATEOAS

rest compare hateoas
Lee Chee Kiam picture Lee Chee Kiam · Sep 13, 2014 · Viewed 20.7k times · Source

HATEOAS (Hypermedia as the Engine of Application State) and HAL (Hypertext Application Language) seem to be related but are not exactly the same. What is the relationship and difference between HATEOAS and HAL?

Answer

astreltsov picture astreltsov · Sep 13, 2014

HATEOAS is a concept of application architecture. It defines the way in which application clients interact with the server, by navigating hypermedia links they find inside resource models returned by the server.

To implement HATEOAS you need some standard way of representing resources, that will contain hypermedia information (links to related resources), for example, something like this:

{
    "links": {
        "self": { "href": "http://api.com/items" },
        "item": [
            { "href": "http://api.com/items/1" },
            { "href": "http://api.com/items/2" }
        ]
    },
    "data": [
            { "itemName": "a" }, 
            { "itemName": "b" } 
    ] 
}

HAL is one of such standards. It is a specific format of resource presentation, that can be used to implement HATEOAS.

You can fully implement HATEOAS without following HAL at all if you prefer to follow another standard or use your own.

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