HATEOAS - Hypermedia as the Engine of Application State

http://martinfowler.com/articles/richardsonMaturityModel.html

• L0:  The Swamp of POX
• L1:  Resources
• L2:  HTTP Verbs
• L3:  Hypermedia Controls  (HATEOAS)

http://spring.io/understanding/HATEOAS
A hypermedia-driven site provides information to navigate the site's REST interfaces dynamically by including hypermedia links with the responses. This capability differs from that of SOA-based systems and WSDL-driven interfaces.

HAL seems to be the leading hypermedia format (for supporting HATEOAS).
I still don't know how to pronounce that damn acronym.


https://spring.io/guides/gs/rest-hateoas/
A library of APIs that you can use to easily create links pointing to Spring MVC controllers, build up resource representations, and control how they’re rendered into supported hypermedia formats such as HAL.