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Architectural Styles of Extensible REST-based Applications
Abstract
At the beginning of the World Wide Web (WWW or Web), there was no clear set of principles to guide the decisions being made by developers and architects. In these early days, a cacophony emerged without a clear direction to guide the evolution of the Web. If there was any direction during the inception of the Web, it was a weak focus on how communication might occur between machines on the Web and the content that was to be transferred. Within a matter of a few years, scalability and other design concerns threatened the future of the early Web- this led to the introduction of REpresentation State Transfer architectural style (REST). The REST style imposed constraints on the exchange of communication over the Web and provided guidance for further modifications to the underlying protocols. The introduction of REST, through the HTTP/1.1 protocol, restored order to the Web by articulating the necessary constraints required for participation.
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, despite the expressive power of REST, not all of its benefits are consistently realized by working systems. To resolve the dissonance between the promise of REST and the reality of fielded systems, we critically examine numerous web architectures. Our investigation yields a set of extensions to REST, an architectural style called Computational REST (CREST), that not only offers additional design guidance, but pinpoints, in many cases, the root cause of the apparent dissonance between style and implementation. Furthermore, CREST explains emerging web architectures (such as mashups) and points to novel computational structures.
Network information systems reached the public consciousness this year as a result of the phenomenal growth in the use of the Internet. In particular, the software constituting NCSA (National Center for Supercomputing Applications) Mosaic and the World Wide Web have made global hypermedia a widespread reality for the first time. The technology underlying this software is described to explain the protocols behind information spaces. These include the historical predecessors, the current protocols with examples, future directions for the software, and discussion of research systems with different architectures. Reasons for its popularity are given, with the goal of illuminating successful services for the National Information Infrastructure.
According to its proponents, open source style software development has the capacity to compete successfully, and perhaps in many cases displace, traditional commercial development methods. In order to begin investigating such claims, we examine the development process of a major open source application, the Apache web server. By using email archives of source code change history and problem reports we quantify aspects of developer participation, core team size, code ownership, productivity, defect density, and problem resolution interval for this OSS project. This analysis reveals a unique process, which performs well on important measures. We conclude that hybrid forms of development that borrow the most effective techniques from both the OSS and commercial worlds may lead to high performance software processes
While a large fraction of application code is devoted to graphical
user interface (GUI) functions, support for reuse in this domain has
largely been confined to the creation of GUI toolkits
(“widgets”). We present a novel architectural style directed
at supporting larger grain reuse and flexible system composition.
Moreover, the style supports design of distributed, concurrent
applications. Asynchronous notification messages and asynchronous
request messages are the sole basis for intercomponent communication. A
key aspect of the style is that components are not built with any
dependencies on what typically would be considered lower-level
components, such as user interface toolkits. Indeed, all components are
oblivious to the existence of any components to which notification
messages are sent. While our focus has been on applications involving
graphical user interfaces, the style has the potential for broader
applicability. Several trial applications using the style are described
The World Wide Web has succeeded in large part because its software architecture has been designed to meet the needs of an Internet-scale distributed hypermedia application. The modern Web architecture emphasizes scalability of component interactions, generality of interfaces, independent deployment of components, and intermediary components to reduce interaction latency, enforce security, and encapsulate legacy systems. In this article we introduce the Representational State Transfer (REST) architectural style, developed as an abstract model of the Web architecture and used to guide our redesign and definition of the Hypertext Transfer Protocol and Uniform Resource Identifiers. We describe the software engineering principles guiding REST and the interaction constraints chosen to retain those principles, contrasting them to the constraints of other architectural styles. We then compare the abstract model to the currently deployed Web architecture in order to elicit mismatches between the existing protocols and the applications they are intended to support.
Netscape 6.0 is finally going into its first public beta. There never was a version 5.0. The last major release, version 4.0, was released almost three years ago. Three years is an awfully long time in the Internet world. During this time, Netscape sat by, helplessly, as their market share plummeted.
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