Hello Experts,
Now that we are past EDR submission and JavaOne, I thought it would be a good opportunity to get back to the topic of Hypermedia.
First, let me summarize what we have so far: (i) we introduced Link and LinkBuilder (ii) we extended ResponseBuilder to accept Link and (iii) allowed a client Target to be created from a Link (for clients to "follow" links). So far, a Link is only mapped to a link header. This seems to be the bare minimum.
There was a talk about hypermedia @ JavaOne from Jayway.se. Their presentation and implementation are available here [1]. In a nutshell, they introduce a new annotation @Linkable (mostly to avoid referring to resource methods) and extend Response and ResponseBuilder. They allow links in entities (including collections) but the implementation only works with JSON so far and uses field injection --any solution that involves entities will introduce significant challenges due to the pluggability of MBR's and MBW's.
Is our current support for Hypermedia sufficient or insufficient? If the latter, what other areas should we explore? Needless to say, given that this is still an area of research, I think we need to avoid any premature standardization.
-- Santiago
[1]
https://github.com/jayway/jax-rs-hateoas