Creating a Hypermedia-Based Web Service

Objective

So far, the JSON file we’ve been working with looks something like this:

{
   "id" : "item-1",
   "name" : "Alf alarm clock",
   "description" : "nothing I really need",
   "price" : 19.99
}

However, after this lesson, we’ll be looking at the following JSON file:

{
   "id" : "item-1",
   "name" : "Alf alarm clock",
   "description" : "nothing I really need",
   "price" : 19.99,
   "_links" : {
      "self" : {
         "href" : "http://localhost:8080/hypermedia/items/item-1"
      },
      "item" : {
         "href" : "http://localhost:8080/hypermedia/items"
      }
   }
}

Not only will we see snippets for the JSON outputs, but there will also be a separate snippet listing each hypermedia link.

What is hypermedia?

Hypermedia is a concept we’re all familiar with in one form or another. It was hypermedia that revolutionized the internet when Tim Berners-Lee created the World Wide Web. Other protocols existed for serving and finding documents (Gopher, Archive, FTP, and others), but the concept of ...