In a new article, Jim Webber, Savas Parastatidis and Ian Robinson show how to drive an application's flow through the use of hypermedia in a RESTful application, using the well-known example from Gregor Hohpe's Starbucks does not use Two-Phase-Commit" to illustrate how the Web's concepts can be used for integration purposes.
While many people have grasped the utility of REST for simple cases, the authors show how to get more value out of the REST core concepts, specifically the "hypermedia as the engine of application state" principle. They show how links, included within resource representations retrieved from the server, can enable the client to find out which possible transitions are available from a particular point in the overall application flow.
Find out more about more about "How to GET a cup of coffee", the RESTful way.