> Yes, that’s what I mean by vague suggestions. How do you actually build and maintain a system of any complexity with that?
Reminds me of the RESTful guy, Roy Fielding (though I respect and like Alan Kay way more). If you've read any of his online interactions, apparently nobody does REST like he envisioned. It simply doesn't exist in the wild. When asked about some REST API, he'll claim it's not RESTful, it's wrong, that's not what he meant, etc. "But what would be right?", you ask, and he'll reply "Read my paper! HATEOAS! (Hypermedia as the engine of application state)". "Ok, but what does it mean in practice, how do I go about building an API with HATEOAS?"...
...and there's no answer for that besides "read my dissertation". He can only tell you what you're doing wrong, but nobody has been able to build a "true" RESTful API to Roy Fielding's satisfaction.
I think you're confused about who Fielding is and what REST is about. His writing isn't about building "true" RESTful APIs. It isn't really about APIs per se at all, RESTful or not. (Further, Fielding to my knowledge isn't even known for his use of the word "RESTful".) It sounds like you've probably been misled by a bunch of people who aren't Fielding about what's in his dissertation. Not unreasonable in those circumstances that one be told to actually read the thing instead of guessing at the gestalt of it based on ambient chatter which is by and large very misinformed.
Having said that, Fielding's writing is not something I would exalt for its clarity. I'm partial to jcrites's explanatory powers: "REST describes how the Web works" <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23672561>
It's incredibly easy to build hypermedia as the engine of application state sites. You generate html pages with state in them, and hyperlinks and forms that filter and change the state.
Hateoas didn't invent anything. He literally just described how web 1.0 worked.
Reminds me of the RESTful guy, Roy Fielding (though I respect and like Alan Kay way more). If you've read any of his online interactions, apparently nobody does REST like he envisioned. It simply doesn't exist in the wild. When asked about some REST API, he'll claim it's not RESTful, it's wrong, that's not what he meant, etc. "But what would be right?", you ask, and he'll reply "Read my paper! HATEOAS! (Hypermedia as the engine of application state)". "Ok, but what does it mean in practice, how do I go about building an API with HATEOAS?"...
...and there's no answer for that besides "read my dissertation". He can only tell you what you're doing wrong, but nobody has been able to build a "true" RESTful API to Roy Fielding's satisfaction.