Representation Design for RESTful Web Services

The evolution of the Web 2.0 phenomenon provides a possible adoption of the RESTful services in reengineering web service. REST components concern the current or intended state of that resource with further transferring among components. A resource can have multiple representations. Itpsilas impossible to predetermine all possible representation of a resource during design of a system while it is very important to label the resource properly. In this paper, the key issues for rendering representations to client are discussed. Some solutions, starting from simple to more difficult ones, are proposed step by step. The advantages and deficiencies of each solution are summarized after that. An ultimate solution ldquoCSS + dynamic configuration file + smart web IDErdquo provides various representations for resource and with a lot of benefits for both server and client.