SOA-readiness of REST

Abstract

SOA is a core concept for designing distributed applications based on the abstraction of software services. The main strength lies in the ability to discover services and loosely-couple them with service consumers across platform-boundaries. The evolved service protocol SOAP and its accompanying standards provide a stable, rich and wide-spread technology stack for implementing SOA-based systems. As an alternative approach to design and implement distributed systems based on services, the architectural style REST gains traction, due to its more light-weight and data format independent nature. Whether REST is also suited for acting as a basis for implementing SOA-based systems is still an open issue, however. This paper focuses on this question and provides an analysis on the SOA-readiness of REST. Both, a theoretical analysis and an empirical study of REST frameworks have been conducted in order to obtain a comprehensive understanding on this matter. The results show a lack of core SOA principles mainly related to the discoverability and the loose coupling of services. © 2014 International Federation for Information Processing.