Towards a RESTful service ecosystem

Abstract

Average information workers spend most of their timefor searching, analyzing, reformatting and consolidating information.The recent advent of service-oriented architectures(SOA) built on Web services is a first attempt to streamlinerespectively automate those tasks in order to increase productivity.SOAP-based services work well within a company and arethus mainly used to for the integration of legacy systems whichhave not been built to be Web-friendly or to make new systemsmore flexible for changing requirements in business ecosystems.Nevertheless, the utopian promise of uniform service interfacestandards, metadata and universal service registries, in the formof the SOAP, WSDL and UDDI standards have proven elusive.Instead, for Internet-scale applications, lightweight REST-basedarchitectures which gained a lot of momentum recently provide anumber of important advantages such as better scalability,reliability and visibility and are thus the preferred choice forInternet-scale applications. Despite the foreseeable potential, theincreasing interest on and growing acceptance of lightweight services,there are still problems on formal describing, finding andorchestrating services as well as a lack of a holistic frameworkcovering the entire service lifecycle. This paper focuses on anextensive survey comparing the traditional SOAP-based architectureto the emergent lightweight REST-based architecturalstyle as a first step towards a framework proposal.