Testing HATEOAS links

In very simple terms, HATEOAS links are used to help make a RESTful API understandable and navigable using the principles of Hypertext alone (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HATEOAS for a more official definition!).

At the time of writing, the structure of HATEOAS links has no official standard. For XML, the Atom (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atom_(standard)) structure is often reused. For example, here is a quote document with HATEOAS links to itself (use of a self link is common) and a link to a related customer resource:

<quote xmlns:atom="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom">
   <id>777</id>
   <amount>100</amount>
   <atom:link rel="self" href="http://localhost:8080/quote/777"/>
   <atom:link rel="customer" href="http://localhost:8080/customer/12345"/>
</quote>

For JSON, the Atom structure is sometimes replicated:

{
    "quote": {
        "id": 12345,
        "amount": 100,
        "links": [
            {
                "rel...