I think it's easy to miss the benefits of HATEOAS. The relative ease with which javascript clients can use so-called level 3 REST to construct resource URLs fr

I think it's easy to miss the benefits of HATEOAS. The relative ease with which javascript clients can use so-called level 3 REST to construct resource URLs from IDs is compelling. We've been using a HATEOAS approach for the interface between our back-end rails app and our front-end javascript rich client. We've seen significant benefits during development because the hypermedia links allow us to DRY up the coupling between client and server. The overall result is much less boiler plate duplication and much clearer client code. It's easier to maintain and extend. We've judiciously identified some exceptions where the client needs to construct URLs explicitly, in our case because the URLs are tied to dates and we think it's silly to have the server construct links for next_day and previous_day let alone an entire calendar view.