Atom Communications Utility with RESTEasy

Question

This is my first post, so please.

I'm actually learning RESTEasy (JBoss), and I'm having some problems understanding the usefulness of adding atoms to my answers on the Internet.

Let me clarify some things:

I am reading the jboss RESTEasy reference manual and I am quoting:

RESTEasy has two mechanisms for associating a resource with another and for associating resources with operations: the Link HTTP header and Atom links inside resource representations.

I do not understand what links one resource to another. What is the point of doing this? What benefits does he offer?

source: http://docs.jboss.org/resteasy/docs/2.3.1.GA/userguide/html/LinkHeader.html

Answer 1

The idea here is to embed links to other related resources in the requested resource, so that customers can follow these links to find available resources - just like people do with web browsers. For this, you often find the term HATEOAS (Hypertext As Enging of Application State).

If links are present (or not), the server can also inform the client that the following operations are possible or not.

To set links, you can put them in the http header or inside the body; for a later case, atom-pub format is used.