High Quality Content by WIKIPEDIA articles! HATEOAS, an abbreviation for Hypermedia as the Engine of Application State, is a constraint of the REST application architecture that distinguishes it from most other network application architectures. The principle is that a client interacts with a network application entirely through hypermedia provided dynamically by application servers. A REST client needs no prior knowledge about how to interact with any particular application or server beyond a generic understanding of hypermedia. Contrast this with e.g. a service-oriented architecture (SOA), where clients and servers interact through a fixed interface shared through documentation or an interface description language (IDL).