HATEOAS stands for Hypermedia as The Engine of Application State. Though it sounds complex, it is quite a simple concept. Its main aim is to decouple the server (the provider of the service) from the client (the consumer of the service).

The service provider provides the service consumer with information about what other actions can be performed on the resource.

Spring HATEOAS provides a HATEOAS implementation--especially for the REST services implemented with Spring MVC.

Important features in Spring HATEOAS are as follows:

• Simplified definition of links pointing to service methods, making the links less fragile
• Support for JAXB (XML-based) and JSON integration
• Support for service consumer (client side)

We will discuss how to use HATEOAS in Chapter 6, Extending Microservices.