Towards a RESTful service ecosystem

Average information workers spend most of their time for searching, analyzing, reformatting and consolidating information. The recent advent of service-oriented architectures (SOA) built on Web services is a first attempt to streamline respectively automate those tasks in order to increase productivity. SOAP-based services work well within a company and are thus mainly used to for the integration of legacy systems which have not been built to be Web-friendly or to make new systems more flexible for changing requirements in business ecosystems. Nevertheless, the utopian promise of uniform service interface standards, metadata and universal service registries, in the form of the SOAP, WSDL and UDDI standards have proven elusive. Instead, for Internet-scale applications, lightweight REST-based architectures which gained a lot of momentum recently provide a number of important advantages such as better scalability, reliability and visibility and are thus the preferred choice for Internet-scale applications. Despite the foreseeable potential, the increasing interest on and growing acceptance of lightweight services, there are still problems on formal describing, finding and orchestrating services as well as a lack of a holistic framework covering the entire service lifecycle. This paper focuses on an extensive survey comparing the traditional SOAP-based architecture to the emergent lightweight REST-based architectural style as a first step towards a framework proposal.