Hypermedia-based Web Services as System Integrators

摘要

As we move more closely to the practical concept of the Internet of Things and, our relianceon public and private APIs increases, web services and their related topics have becomeutterly crucial to the informatics community. However, the question about which style of webservices would best solve a particular problem, can raise signi cant and multifarious debates.There can be found two implementation styles that highlight themselves: the RPC-orientedstyle represented by the SOAP protocol’s implementations and the hypermedia style, which isrepresented by the REST architectural style’s implementations.As we search examples of already established web services, we can nd a handful of robustand reliable public and private SOAP APIs, nevertheless, it seems that RESTful services aregaining popularity in the enterprise community. For the current generation of developers thatwork on informatics solutions, REST seems to represent a fundamental and straightforwardalternative and even, a more deep-rooted approach than SOAP. But are they comparable? Doboth approaches have each speci c best suitable scenarios? Such study is brie y carried outin the present document’s chapters, starting with the respective background study, followingan analysis of the hypermedia approach and an instantiation of its architecture, in a particularcase study applied in a BPM context.