Lately I’ve been having a bit of fun learning ASP.NET Web API and I’ve been working with Jake Ginnivan to come up with a library that allows you to follow the HATEOS principle of REST using it. We’ve been doing this by implementing a specification that allows you to specify hypermedia for JSON and XML called HAL.

Jake did some awesome work to start it off and more recently I came along and tried to make the specification of the hypermedia as unobtrusive as possible.

It’s very rough around the edges, and definitely a work-in-progress, but if you are interested feel free to check out the latest work that I’ve been doing on it at: https://github.com/robdmoore/Hal.PlayAround.

To see it in action simply fire up the site, the homepage is a HTML page that allows you to interact with the dummy API I created via a set of HTML forms (the actual requests are made with JavaScript). If you inspect the PersonController class you will see that I barely had to add anything to it to get the hypermedia in there.

Enjoy!