I want to agree with you, "Hypermedia Controls" seems a bit odd to me, but I don't think it's such a new concept when it comes to REST. This is from Roy Fieldi

I want to agree with you, "Hypermedia Controls" seems a bit odd to me, but I don't think it's such a new concept when it comes to REST. This is from Roy Fielding's blog: http://roy.gbiv.com/untangled/2008/rest-apis-must-be-hypertext-driven http://roy.gbiv.com/untangled/2008/rest-apis-must-be-hyperte... ... all application state transitions must be driven by client selection of server-provided choices that are present in the received representations or implied by the user’s manipulation of those representations.The transitions may be determined (or limited by) the client’s knowledge of media types and resource communication mechanisms, both of which may be improved on-the-fly (e.g., code-on-demand). [Failure here implies that out-of-band information is driving interaction instead of hypertext.] He's explicate in that a REST system must return options for further action. Links. This is the default behavior of the web, request a page get a page full of links. Martin Fowler is just describing a system that uses a hypermedia implementation other than html. The benefit to this is that you don't need out-of-band information to interact with a new server you run into.