[ivan_gammel]

It’s literally in server response:

   {
    … resource model
    _links: {
       “delete” : { “href” : “.” }
    }

In this example you receive list of permitted operations embedded in the resource model. href=. means you can perform this operation on resource self link.

[hughw]

The promise of REST and HATEOAS was best realized not by building RESTful apps like say "my airline reservation app" but by building a programming system, spiritually like HTTP + HTML, in which you'd able to declaratively specify applications, of which "my airline reservation app" could be one and "my sports gambling service" could be another. So some smart person would invent a new application protocol with rich semantics as you did above, and a new type of user agent installed on desktops understands how to present them to the user, and the app on the server just assembles the resources in this rich format, directing users to their choices through the states of hte program.

So that never got done (because it's complex) and people started building apps like "my airline reservation app" but then realized to to build that domain app you don't need all the abstraction of a full REST system.

[shadowgovt]

Oh, interesting. So rather than the UI computing what operations should be allowed currently by, say, knowing the user's current role and having rules baked into it about the relationship between role and UI widgets, the UI can compute what motive should be in or simply off of explicit statements or capability from the server.

I can see some meat on these bones. The counterpoint is that the protocol is now chattier than it would be otherwise... But a full analysis of bandwidth to the client would have to factor that you have to ship over a whole framework to implement those rules and keep those rules synchronized between client and server implementation.

[ivan_gammel]

I’d suggest that bandwidth optimization should happen when it becomes critical and control presence of hypermedia controls via feature flag or header. This way frontend becomes simpler, so FE dev speed and quality improves, but backend becomes more complex. The main problem here is that most backend frameworks are supporting RMM level 2 and hypermedia controls require different architecture to make server code less verbose. Unfortunately REST wasn’t understood well, so full support of it wasn’t in focus of open source community.