> It's impossible for me to see how it would be possible to write a HATEOAS client, and I can't in practice see anyone doing so. There's nothing complicated ab

> It's impossible for me to see how it would be possible to write a HATEOAS client, and I can't in practice see anyone doing so. There's nothing complicated about a client that understands Hypermedia links. You start at the root, it'll give you a set of links to follow, and you recurse. Here's a browser that can take a HATEOAS-compatible API and will let you work your way through the API: http://dracoblue.github.io/hateoas-browser/ http://dracoblue.github.io/hateoas-browser/ > Optimizing for HATEOAS seems to me to be optimizing for entirely the wrong metrics, and a complete waste of development time and effort. Correct. HATEOAS is a neat parlor trick: point a dumb client at your API and watch it enumerate all the possible operations. Wow! The problem is that APIs aren't consumed that way, they're consumed by humans who need to decide which API calls to make based on user actions in the application... so developers will resort to consulting documentation in order to piece together the correct calls in the correct order. That's not something you can encode through Hypermedia. At best you can just model the relations between calls, but not the "how" or "why" of everything.