In a previous post, I exposed the principles of HATEOAS and illustrated these principles with an implementation based on Spring MVC and Spring HATEOAS. In this post, I'll go further with the implementation of a paged REST web services that follows the guidelines of HATEOAS. This implementation is based again on Spring MVC and Spring HATEOAS, and uses Spring Data JPA's built-in paging features for the database backend.

REST has been getting momentum for the last few years. Roy Fielding was the first to come up with the term "REST" in the 5th chapter of his thesis. When describing REST, we usually say this style of architecture builds on top of 5 principles: resources, uniform interface, representation, stateless architecture, hypermedia. Today we'll study the hypermedia principle and see how to implement HATEOAS - hypermedia as the engine of application state - with Spring MVC.