Relationship and difference between HAL and HATEOAS

Question

HATEOAS (Hypermedia as the Engine of Application State) and HAL (Hypertext Application Language) seem to be related but are not exactly the same. What is the relationship and difference between HATEOAS and HAL?

Solution

HATEOAS is a concept of application architecture. It defines the way in which application clients interact with the server, by navigating hypermedia links they find inside resource models returned by the server.

To implement HATEOAS you need some standard way of representing resources, that will contain hypermedia information (links to related resources), for example, something like this:

{
    "links": {
        "self": { "href": "http://api.com/items" },
        "item": [
            { "href": "http://api.com/items/1" },
            { "href": "http://api.com/items/2" }
        ]
    },
    "data": [
            { "itemName": "a" }, 
            { "itemName": "b" } 
    ] 
}

HAL is one of such standards. It is a specific format of resource presentation, that can be used to implement HATEOAS.

You can fully implement HATEOAS without following HAL at all if you prefer to follow another standard or use your own.

Comments

[Lee Chee Kiam]

Besides HAL, what are standards you are aware of?

[astreltsov]

There's collection+json and at least a couple of others

[RAM]

There is also collection+JSON, JSON-LD, and the use of link headers.