HATEOAS: What It Is and Why Almost No One Uses It

cloudmato.com — Sun, 05 Jul 2026 19:47:46 +0530

Everyone is building “REST APIs” nowadays. You have got endpoints, you return JSON, you use GET and POST and DELETE, you send back 404 when something is missing. Congratulations, you have a REST API. Right?

Well, according to the person who literally coined the term REST, probably not. And the piece you are missing is a scary-looking acronym called HATEOAS — the one part of REST that almost nobody implements and most people can’t even spell. I have been writing APIs for more than 8 years and honestly, for the longest time I treated HATEOAS as academic trivia. So let me untangle it: what it is, why the industry collectively ignores it, and the more interesting question — when you actually earn the right to call your thing a REST API.

Hateoas on cloudmato.com

HATEOAS: What It Is and Why Almost No One Uses It