Scenarios for RESTful Web Services

The RESTful approach is very attractive for large scale integration scenarios that cross many organizational boundaries. This is because the constraints imposed by the REST principles emphasize interoperability and scalability. The constraint of uniform interfaces supports those scenarios in which the consumer base for the services is so broad that it makes it difficult to create and maintain a large set of custom interfaces. In such cases, it makes more sense to apply a design in which a single interface can support all the required interactions. Unfortunately, modeling everything as a set of resources that are all exposed through a uniform interface is not always easy. Developers are accustomed to designing a specific interface for each piece of functionality or data that they wish to expose; forcing them to always use a uniform interface is antithetical to this. However, scenarios in which services are just providing access to data can easily support the uniform interface constraint. This is because any kind of data can be manipulated through the same set of create, read, update, and delete operations. Thus, scenarios in which it is primarily data that needs to be shared through web services make REST an easy choice.

soa, web services, REST, SOAP