Evaluating a Representational State Transfer (REST) Architecture: What is the Impact of REST in My Architecture?

The use of Representational State Transfer (REST) as an architectural style for integrating services and applications brings several benefits, but also poses new challenges and risks. Particularly important among those risks are failures to effectively address quality attribute requirements such as security, reliability, and performance. An architecture evaluation early in the software life cycle can identify and help mitigate those risks. In this paper we present guidelines to assist architecture evaluation activities in REST-based systems. These guidelines can be systematically used in conjunction with scenario-based evaluation methods to reason about design considerations and trade-offs. This paper also presents a proof of concept to describe how to use the guidelines in the context of an Architecture Trade-off Analysis Method (ATAM) evaluation.