Odtnhj

I'm trying to build an architecture of RESTful services, and to build a gateway service for all of those, with Java Spring. In order to make the latter, I need to implement a client for the other services, which me and my colleagues tried to design around the HATEOAS principle, by providing links to related resources through spring-hateoas module.

Let's say I have a service running on localhost, listening on 8080 port, which returns a collection of resources with a GET operation on /resources. For example:

 "_embedded" : 
 "resources" : [ 
 "label" : "My first resource!",
 "resourceId" : 3,
 "_links" : 
 "self" : 
 "href" : "http://localhost:8080/resources/3"
 ,
 "meals" : 
 "href" : "http://localhost:8080/resources",
 "templated" : true
 
 
 , 
 "label" : "Another resource!",
 "resourceId" : 4,
 "_links" : 
 "self" : 
 "href" : "http://localhost:8080/resources/4"
 ,
 "meals" : 
 "href" : "http://localhost:8080/resources",
 "templated" : true
 
 
 ]
 ,
 "_links" : 
 "self" : 
 "href" : "http://localhost:8080/resources",
 "templated" : true
 
 

I'm trying to use a HATEOAS client such as Traverson. How could I follow a resource element simply by following HATEOAS links? My solution so far has been to add a link to item on my collection, such as follow:

"_links" : 
 "self" : 
 "href" : "http://localhost:8080/resources",
 "templated" : true
 ,
 "item" : 
 "href" : "http://localhost:8080/resources/id",
 "templated" : true
 

So then I can replace the id directly in the template with Traverson and follow the result. But is it a good practice? Should I proceed another way?