Ndtyjky

I'm trying to build an architecture of RESTful services, and to build a gateway service for all of those, with Java Spring. In order to make the latter, I need to implement a client for the other services, which me and my colleagues tried to design around the HATEOAS principle, by providing links to related resources through spring-hateoas module.

Let's say I have a service running on localhost, listening on 8080 port, which returns a collection of resources with a GET operation on /resources. For example:

{

  "_embedded" : {

    "resources" : [ {

      "label" : "My first resource!",

      "resourceId" : 3,

      "_links" : {

        "self" : {

          "href" : "http://localhost:8080/resources/3"

        },

        "meals" : {

          "href" : "http://localhost:8080/resources",

          "templated" : true

        }

      }

    }, {

      "label" : "Another resource!",

      "resourceId" : 4,

      "_links" : {

        "self" : {

          "href" : "http://localhost:8080/resources/4"

        },

        "meals" : {

          "href" : "http://localhost:8080/resources",

          "templated" : true

        }

      }

    } ]

  },

  "_links" : {

    "self" : {

      "href" : "http://localhost:8080/resources",

      "templated" : true

    }

  }

}

I'm trying to use a HATEOAS client such as Traverson. How could I follow a resource element simply by following HATEOAS links? My solution so far has been to add a link to item on my collection, such as follow:

"_links" : {

    "self" : {

      "href" : "http://localhost:8080/resources",

      "templated" : true

    },

    "item" : {

      "href" : "http://localhost:8080/resources/{id}",

      "templated" : true

    }

}

So then I can replace the id directly in the template with Traverson and follow the result. But is it a good practice? Should I proceed another way?