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by ivan_gammel 346 days ago
It’s something else. List of available actions may include other resources, so you cannot express it with pure HTTP, you need a data model for that (HAL is one of possible solutions, but there are others)
1 comments

With HATEOAS you're supposed to return the list of available actions with the representation of your state.

Neo4j's old REST API was really good about that. See e.g. get node: https://neo4j.com/docs/rest-docs/current/#rest-api-get-node

That API doesn’t look like REST level 3 API. For example, there’s an endpoint to create a node. It is not referenced by root or anywhere else. GetNode endpoint does include some traversal links in response, but those links are part of domain model, not part of the protocol. HAL does offer a protocol by which you enhance your domain model with links with semantics and additional resources.
I'm not saying it's perfect, but it's really good, and you could create a client for it in an evening.
It is interesting to me that GraphQL would be in "the swamp of POX," mostly because personal experience was that shifting from hand-built REST to GraphQL solved a lot of problems we had. Mostly around discovery and composition; the ability to sometimes ask for a little data and sometimes a lot at the same endpoint is huge, and the fact that all of that happens under the same syntax as opposed to smearing out such controls over headers, method, URI, and query params decreased cognitive load.

Perhaps the real issue was that XML is awful and a much thinner resource representation simplifies most of the problems for developers and users.