Today's top "RESTful" services and why they are not RESTful

Abstract

Since Fielding's seminal contribution on the REST architecture style in 2000, the so-called class of RESTful services has taken off to challenge previously existing Web services. Several books have since then emerged, providing a set of valuable guidelines and design principles for the development of truly RESTful services. However, today's most popular "RESTful" services adopt only few of these guidelines, resulting in overburdening developers integrating multiple services in mashup applications. In this paper we present an in-depth analysis for the top 20 RESTful services listed on programmableweb.com against 17 RESTful service design criteria found in literature. Results provide evidence that hardly any of the services claiming to be RESTful is truly RESTful, probably due to the lack of rigidness and ease-of-use of currently available decision criteria. To improve the situation, we provide recommendations for various stakeholder groups. © 2012 Springer-Verlag.