RESTful Web Services – A Question of Standards

Roy Thomas Fielding defined the term REST as an architectural style for distributed hypermedia based systems in the year 2000. Since this initial definition, the term itself became a buzzword used in almost any web-related development. From simple, basic web applications, to highly complex web service/microservice-based solutions, almost everyone and everything talks REST and RESTful. Moreover, the Web context implies that these developments are usually realised over HTTP. In this paper, we first analyse the impact of this architectural style on distributed application development. A careless application of this model and its underlying HTTP standards could severely impact on the overall quality of any RESTful based solution. Following, we submit our own model for user data and session handling tasks to illustrate the correct approach to RESTful web service design techniques. This model offers all the advantages of the aforementioned architectural style while providing the required functionality for the authentication and authorisation components of all web based applications.