It is just another Thursday of adding features to your mobile app.
You have blasted through your task list by extending the current underlying object model + data retrieval code.
Your front-end native views are all coming together. The navigation between views and specific data loading is all good.
Git Commit. Git Push. The build pops out on HockeyApp. The Friday sprint review goes well. During the sprint review the product manager points out that full CRUD (Create, Read, Update, Delete) functionality is required in each of the added views. You only have the ‘R’ in ‘CRUD’ implemented. You look through your views, think it just can’t be that bad to add C, U and D, and commit to adding full CRUD to all the views by next Friday’s sprint review.
The weekend passes by, you come in on Monday and start going through all your views to add full CRUD. You update your first view with full CRUD; start navigating through your app; do some creates, updates, and deletes; and notice that all of those other views you added last week are just broken. Whole swaths of classes are sharing data you didn’t know was shared between them. Mutation to data in one view has unknown effects on the other views due to the shared references to data classes from your back-end object model.
Your commitment to having this all done by Friday is looking like a pipe-dream.
HATEOAS stands for “Hypermedia as the Engine of Application State” and it is one of the possible constraints that you can place on a REST compliant API. Essentially what it means is that your API is as navigable as a normal website, with hyperlinks leading to other resources. The focus of this blog is not HATEOAS itself – instead focusing on an implementation of it our team recently used for our project’s API.
