Web services: Architectural styles and design considerations for REST API

Abstract

The issue of sharing real time data with others is paramount, especially in today’s digital age. We have lots of applications generating tons of data every minute. Each and every row of such data is useful either to the data generator or to a third party application. But we need a standard set of protocols to share data between applications over a network. This is where Application Programming Interfaces comes in. By using web services any application can share and read information automatically from other applications without human interference. This greatly advances the data sharing between applications, hence improving the services, productivity and user experience. We identified that soccer and sports in general pumps large amount of data into the internet, with no proper way to leverage it. Hence, we will be building a system, that collects this massive data from 1993 all the way up to the present time and will continue to do so automatically as long as there is data to mine, and a REST API on top of it so that the client/developers can access this data in a slick, automated, efficient and a fast way. This paper deals with various ways of leveraging data available online as well as an in detail comparison of the two major types of web services namely: SOAP & REST. It then goes on to detail the architectural styles and the design considerations to build REST API from scratch.