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Rethinking Web Services from First Principles Extended Abstract
Abstract
REpresentational State Transfer (REST) guided the creation and expansion of the modern web. What began as an internet-scale distributed hypermedia system is now a vast sea of shared and interdependent services. However, proposed Web Services protocols abandon REST altogether in favor of SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol) exchanges codified in XML that hijack HTTP (HyperText Transport Protocol) as transport. Another path is possible. Our investigation yields a set of extensions to REST, an architectural style called Computational REST (CREST), that embraces service exchanges as the fundamental element of web interaction, obviating Web Services as a separate, incompatible layer atop a web whose underlying architectural model is REST.
... The artifact, that can be a software, a method or experimental evidence among others, is created using accordant constructive research methods, engineering approaches or software development methods. The Internet can be used as an implementation and enactment environment for the artifact (see e.g., Lei et al., 2006;Erenkrantz et al., 2007;Ghinea et al., 2009;Vaishnavi et al., 2009;Babik et al., 2012;Tapan and Reddy, 2013). Furthermore, it supports the design process by providing information that can be found in forums addressing developers or users of a specific technology. ...
Internet technology has changed not only multiple aspects of our everyday lives but it has also affected the research methods both in behavorist and design science. Since Information Systems Research (ISR) combines both approaches, changes in information creation and discovery have important effect on its research activities. Information systems researchers focus on the development of new technologies and tools, observe new or known phenomena in organizations with the focus on using the methods of the Design Science Research (DSR). Shifting these activities online expands the scale and scope of these studies but it also entails risks to research quality and artifact usage. Internet research is inherently no more risky than traditional observational, survey, implementation, design or experimental methods. Yet the risks and precautions against them will differ from those characterizing traditional research and will change over time. This paper summarizes some benefits and challenges of conducting information systems research using the Internet technology. Embedding the evolving toolset of online methods into the ISR branches of behavorist DSR process the paper outlines challenging aspects for both researchers and institutional review boards enabling the preservation of the research quality
... Besides requiring the developer to predefine the part or parts of the application that is to be moved, they still require significant networking resources. More recently, computational REST (CREST) 18,19 has been proposed, but not demonstrated. CREST extends REST 8 with the notion of computational resources (e.g. ...
Mobile Cloud-Computing (MCC) is a term introduced by Marc Baccue in 200920 that popularized the idea of using cloud-hosted components as a means to overcome the resource-constraints of mobile devices. But as the smartphones and tablets overcame their resource-constraints, the meaning of the term MCC changed. Nowadays MCC is mainly associated with using mobile devices to engage cloud-hosted services and to a lesser extend with combining multiple mobile devices (e.g. cloud of devices). However, as the number of users with multiple mobile devices increases there is a growing demand for enabling apps on mobile devices to share hardware and software resources. This in turn leads to questions regarding decentralized interaction, coordination and resource sharing among multiple mobile devices.
... We were able to reclassify all papers stating to present an implementation as system design. For IS curriculum we agreed that it is not considered an IS research output as it is not related to an information system and to ignore the type for the further proceeding, After analysis of term the individual classifications, we agreed upon eight types, listed in table 4. [80]; [49]; [81] Pattern Support Definition of reusable elements of design with its benefits and application context [63]; [32] Metric Support A mathematical model that is able to measure aspects of systems or methods [42] Re-classified as 'no design' ...
Many information systems researchers designate their work as design science referring to the term “IT artifact” and the categorization
systems that have emerged under this label. Alas, there is no consensus at this point as to what the research output in design
science is and what types of artifacts exist. Using a widely accepted artifact typology would strengthen the scientific discussion
and ease the categorization of contributions. Based on a literature review of all DESRIST publications and a special MISQ
issue on design science, we derived such a typology. We identified eight relevant artifact types and related our typology
to existing ones. With this contribution, we hope to enable a discussion about what legitimate design science outputs and
their main types are.
... Erenkrantz et al. [15] published a paper "Rethinking Web Services from First Principles", where they propose improvements to the REST pattern/algorithm mid-range design in form of the protocol and architecture style "Computational REST". The new mid-range design builds on REST, but improves the integration of Web Services into the web. ...
Not much is known about how design knowledge is re-used in Design Science Research (DSR). The concepts of “generalization”
and “transfer” as different types of knowledge-building and re-use are discussed in other disciplines and in Information System
Research in general, but less so in DSR. Offermann et al. [1] proposed three ranges of design theories and seven strategies
for how to create and generalize design knowledge. In this paper, we classify all DESRIST 2006 – 2010 publications according
to design range and research strategy. By doing so, we empirically ground the merely theoretically established research strategies,
and are able to discover three additional strategy types. The literature analysis shows that the specification of design range
and strategy in abstracts is often incomplete or misleading. Based on the analysis we recommend template abstracts for design
science publications which guide researchers on how to include all relevant information about design knowledge they (re-)used.
Mobile cloud-computing (MCC) is a term introduced by Mark Beccue in 2009 (Beccue and Shey 2009) that popularized the idea of using cloud-hosted components as a means to overcome the resource constraints of mobile devices. But as the smartphones and tablets overcame their resource-constraints, the meaning of the term MCC changed. Nowadays MCC is mainly associated with using mobile devices to engage cloud-hosted services and to a lesser extend with combining multiple mobile devices (e.g. cloud of devices). However, as the number of users with multiple mobile devices increases there is a growing demand for enabling apps on mobile devices to share hardware and software resources. This in turn leads to questions regarding decentralized interaction, coordination and resource sharing among multiple mobile devices. This paper focuses on the horizontal scalability of apps e.g. the ability to combine multiple mobile devices (executing the same mobile app) into a single compute environment that utilizes all available hardware and software resources in a decentralized manner. One possible approach to achieve this is by designing mobile apps as sets of RESTful micro-services and to allow these services to communicate via low-bandwidth IoT communication protocols. Security becomes critical when exploring scaling out of an app. Designing such apps should seriously be taken into account in order to limit additional data confidentiality and privacy risks. This paper presents the results of our performance evaluations using RESTful micro-services on mobile devices that communicate via the IoT protocol CoAP in different WIFI environments and different encryption methods.
Decentralized systems are systems-of-systems whose services are governed by two or more separate organizations under distinct spheres of authority. Coordinated evolution of the various elements of a decentralized system may be difficult, if not impossible, as individual organizations evolve their service offerings in response to organization- and service-specific pressures, including market demand, technology, competitive and cooperative interests, and funding. Consequently, decentralized services offer unique challenges for evolution and adaptation that reach well beyond any one single organizational boundary. However, client-driven service customization and tailoring is a powerful tool for meeting conflicting, independent client demands in an environment where disorderly and uneven service evolution predominates. To this end, we contribute an architectural style, COmputAtional State Transfer (COAST), designed to provide extensive, safe, and secure client-directed customization of decentralized services. COAST combines mechanisms from software architecture, cryptography, security, and programming languages, granting application architects flexible provisioning of their core services and assets while protecting those services and assets from attack and misuse.
Mobile handsets (phones) are expected to increase from the current 4.5B (billion) subscriptions to over 6B in 2013 and thus dwarf the numbers of PCs (e.g. desktop, laptop, netbook, etc.) that are expected to rise from the current 1.1B to 2B in 2015. But more importantly, data transmission from and to mobile handsets is becoming and increasingly available and affordable. The dramatic improvements in the data transmission have allowed the mobile handsets to compensate for their lack of computational resources when compared to other mobile devices. As a result the mobile handset is becoming the ubiquitous computing device for a rapidly growing number of users. This paper focuses on the question of how the growing number of mobile handsets will impact digital service ecologies. The paper examines key challenges in connecting large numbers of mobile handsets to service ecologies and presents possible approaches for dealing with them.
REpresentational State Transfer (REST) and the resource-oriented viewpoint are considered to be the guiding principles behind the WWW ULS ecosystem. RESTful principles are responsible for many of the desirable ULS quality attributes achieved, such as loose-coupling, reliability, data visibility and interoperability. However, many exiting Web-based or service-oriented applications (WSDL/SOAP-based) only use WWW/HTTP as a tunneling protocol or abuse URL and POX (Plain Old XML) by encoding method semantics in them. These applications are designed as fine-grained distributed Remote Procedure Calls (RPC), breaking many of the REST principles, and are subsequently harmful to the overall ULS system health. The debate on REST versus SOAP-based "Big" Web services has been raging in the industry. We observe that the main problems lie in two areas: 1) conceptually modeling process-centric business applications using a "resource-oriented" viewpoint promoted by the REST principles; and 2) decentralizing a workflow-based business process (e.g. BPEL) into distributed and dynamic process fragments. In this paper, we propose a solution to these two problems. Our approach aligns process-intensive applications with the basic Web principles and promotes dynamic and distributed process coordination.
REpresentational State Transfer (REST) is the set of design principles behind the World Wide Web (WWW). REST treats all entities in the world as link-connected resources, and supports a resource-oriented architecture (ROA) for the design of applications. REST and ROA are responsible for many of the desirable quality attributes achieved in the WWW, such as loose-coupling (better adaptability) and interoperability. However, many exiting Web-based or service-oriented applications (WSDL/SOAP-based) only use WWW/HTTP as a tunneling protocol or abuse URL and POX (Plain Old XML) by encoding method semantics in them. These applications use fine-grained remote procedure calls (RPC), breaking REST/ROA principles. We observe two kinds of challenges: 1) conceptually modelling process-intensive applications using a ROA promoted by the REST principles; and 2) practically decomposing a workflow-based business process into distributed, dynamic and RESTful process fragments. In this paper, we propose a ROA for business processes following the RESTful principles. We evaluate our approach by comparing it with current SOAP/WSDL/BPEL-driven approaches in terms of feasibility, process visibility, interoperability, and adaptability.
During the last decade, design research (DR) has evolved into a key research paradigm in information systems (IS). DR for IS is aimed at creating solutions so called design products or artifacts to problems of practical relevance. From a product perspective, these artifacts can be distinguished into the five types constructs, models, methods, instantiations, and theories. This paper analyzes the proceedings of the First and Second International Conference on Design Science Research in Information Systems and Technology (DESRIST) and categorizes the presented papers in regard to the topics covered. It turns out that the method artifact is addressed least frequently. Moreover, almost all DESRIST publications which do address the method artifact describe the design of some kind of algorithm or mathematical/statistical technique. The method engineering (ME) discipline is concerned exclusively with the processes of constructing, adapting, and implementing generic methods that are aimed at the design of socio-technical information systems. However, explicit references to the ME discipline and its body of literature are used rarely if at all in the DESRIST proceedings. To overcome this gap, this paper briefly introduces the principles of the ME approach. Moreover, it discusses potential reasons for the lacking integration of DR for IS on the one hand and the ME approach to IS development on the other hand. The paper argues that the transfer and application of the basic ideas of the ME discipline hold a strong potential of bringing forward the DR paradigm.
The Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) is an application-level protocol for distributed, collaborative, hypermedia information systems. It is a generic, stateless, protocol which can be used for many tasks beyond its use for hypertext, such as name servers and distributed object management systems, through extension of its request methods, error codes and headers [47]. A feature of HTTP is the typing and negotiation of data representation, allowing systems to be built independently of the data being transferred. HTTP has been in use by the World-Wide Web global information initiative since 1990. This specification defines the protocol referred to as "HTTP/1.1", and is an update to RFC 2068 [33]. RFC 2616 HTTP/1.1 June, 1999 Fielding, et al Standards Track [Page 2] Table of Contents HYPERTEXT TRANSFER PROTOCOL -- HTTP/1.1.................................................1 Status of this Memo ...............................................................................................
MAST: A dynamic language for programmable networks
- D Vyzovitis
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D. Vyzovitis and A. Lippman, “MAST: A dynamic language for programmable networks,” MIT Media Laboratory, Tech. Rep., May 2002.