r/rest

Hi,

I am Lorenzo, one of the developers at Hydra Ecosystem. We are creating tools for HTTP REST APIs based on a W3C draft hopefully to become official soon; briefly we are implementing a framework that is meant to be a semantic layer to map relations among REST servers, we have our own client/server stack (based on Python Flask, but also other tools). We are also participating in Google Summer Of Code since 2017. You can found our codebase at github.com/HTTP-APIs or follow us on Twitter.

The best entrypoint to the tech stack is from [this document](https://www.hydraecosystem.org/Starting-Mat

To me, it seems that using HATEOAS would break the possibility to use a thin and rather stupid client to access a REST API. Is it possible to design a REST API that uses HATEOAS, while retaining the thin client paradigm and if so, how?

I was thinking about this in the car the other day, and it's so annoying to be interrogated when I simply ask either, "Do you have a REST API?" or "Is your REST API included in our contract?" or "Can I get access to the REST API?"

In most cases, I end up getting interrogated about it. What is it that I'm looking for specifically ("access to your REST API"), what am I hoping to do with it ("interact with it, thank you"), and why would I need a thing like that? ("you wouldn't understand").

I arrived at an analogy that I may soon use to describe my frustration. Imagine, if you will, a piece of software that has data in it. Now imagine the typical set of questions that would be asked by ty