SOA with REST: Principles, Patterns & Constraints for Building Enterprise Solutions with REST (The Pearson Service Technology Series from Thomas Erl)

 “This book illuminates the connection of the two domains--SOA and REST--in a manner that is concrete and practical, providing concise application to everyday architectural challenges. Fantastic!”

--Ryan Frazier, Technology Strategist, Microsoft

“...a tour de force that elegantly applies REST principles to the industry-standard SOA framework described in prior titles in this series.... This book is a must-read for anyone developing REST services.”

--Dave Slotnick, Enterprise Architect, Rackspace Hosting

“This book undoubtedly will help SOA to reap the benefits from the main value propositions of Web architecture….”

--Dr. Erik Wilde, Architect, EMC Corporation

“REST is so much more than just another type of interface implementation--SOA with REST shows how the ecosystem of service compositions changes as new opportunities arise for service composition architecture designs. A comprehensive guide and a must-read for any serious IT architect considering REST-style services for application architectures.”

--Roger Stoffers, Solution Architect, Hewlett Packard

“Service-orientation and REST both are architectural styles that are cornerstones of modern applications and cloud computing. Both aim to deliver scalable, interoperable solutions, but their different roots don’t always make them a natural fit. SOA with REST explains how the two styles can work together in enterprise environments. It discusses a design process for a services portfolio that meets the goals of SOA and at the same time designs services that comply with the established REST constraints. It also shows pragmatic approaches to meet enterprise-grade requirements with the REST programming style but relaxes constraints where necessary.”

--Christoph Schittko, Director of Cloud Strategy, Microsoft

“An excellent repertoire of service-oriented patterns that will prove handy when solving problems in the real world. The REST perspectives and principles will provide complete coverage of modern-day Web 2.0 style approaches. Highly recommended.”

--Sid Sanyal, IT Architect, Zurich Financial Services

“An inspirational book that provides deep insight into the design and development of next-generation service-oriented systems based on the use of REST. This book clarifies the convergence of SOA and REST with no-nonsense content that addresses common questions and issues head-on. An essential ‘instrument of modern service implementation’ and a powerful body of knowledge for software designers, architects, and consultants.”

--Pethuru Raj, Ph.D., Enterprise Architecture (EA) Consultant, Wipro Consulting Services

“REST and SOA are two of the most misunderstood terms in the software industry over the past decade. Yet the REST architectural style coupled with modern RESTful framework implementations provides a scalable and reliable approach to SOA. This book covers all you need to know about how to take the principles of REST and apply them in small and large SOA developments. If you are familiar with REST and thinking about SOA, then you need this book. If you have not considered REST in your SOA work, then this book is for you, too. Covering concepts of both REST and SOA, as well as design patterns and when to use them, the book is a wonderful companion and a good tool for architects and engineers.”

--Dr. Mark Little, CTO JBoss, Red Hat

“Unlike many other texts on the subject, SOA with REST is a well-rounded, easy-to-read narrative, including real-world case studies that appeal to both developers and analysts. This makes it an indispensable source for any SOA practitioner or any professional who is planning to initiate an SOA project.”

--Theodore T. Morrison, Certified SOA Analyst, CSM, Geocent, LLC

“SOA and REST are two very important architectural styles for distributed computing. SOA is successfully adopted by most enterprises, and the REST style is getting more attention from both researcher and industry users. The book SOA with REST introduces a new architectural style that is ingeniously combining both SOA and REST styles and clearly reveals how SOA and REST can work together to generate successful enterprise SOA strategies with REST, along with guidance for making architecture design decisions. This book is a bible of best practices for designing and implementing SOA architecture with REST. It is a must-have reference book for both IT practitioners and researchers.”

--Longji Tang, FedEx IT Senior Technical Advisor, Ph.D. in CSSE

The Definitive Guide to Building Web-Centric SOA with REST

The World Wide Web is based on the most successful technology architecture in history.  It has changed how we view, access, and exchange information and, with the advent of REST, it has also provided us with compelling ways to build and improve automation solutions. REST provides a great deal of guidance to ensure that an architecture and its automation logic are technically sound, though it is still your responsibility to build services that actually add value to your business.

SOA with REST is the first comprehensive tutorial and reference for designing and building RESTful services as part of service-oriented solutions and in conjunction with service-oriented architecture (SOA). This book demonstrates that REST is not only a suitable medium for building truly service-oriented solutions, but also that the service-oriented architectural model is a necessary foundation for REST technology architectures to realize their full business potential.

The authors provide thorough mapping of REST constraints and architectural goals with service-orientation principles and SOA characteristics. Using real-world examples, they show how to leverage REST’s simplicity, flexibility, and low overhead without compromising the power or manageability of service-oriented solutions and architectures.

This book will be valuable to IT architects, developers, and any practitioner seeking to use SOA and REST together.

Topic Areas

• Distributed solution design with HTTP and REST
• REST-based service composition architectures
• REST service modeling and a service-oriented analysis process for REST service candidates
• Technical service contract notation for REST services based on a uniform contract
• Designing REST service contracts with service-orientation
• Understanding REST constraints in relation to service-orientation principles
• Using hypermedia and dynamic binding within SOA and service compositions
• Creating complex HTTP-based methods for enterprise solutions
• Advanced design techniques, including composition deepening, runtime logic deferral, and dynamic binding with common properties
• Cross-service transactions and event-driven messaging with REST
• Addressing enterprise solution concerns in relation to REST-based state management
• Applying SOA design patterns to REST-based solutions
• Distinguishing REST and SOA service concepts and terminology
• Designing REST architectures with SOA
• Versioning REST services and uniform contracts
• Fundamental REST, SOA, and service-orientation concepts and terminology
• REST constraints, REST architectural goals, and properties
• Seven new REST-inspired design patterns
• Defining common goals of REST and SOA

Thomas Erl is a best-selling IT author and the world’s top-selling SOA author. His books encompass topics ranging from cloud computing, semantic Web technology, and SOA. He is the series editor of the Prentice Hall Service Technology Series from Thomas Erl, as well as the editor of the Service Technology Magazine. With more than 160,000 copies in print world-wide, his published books have become international bestsellers and have been formally endorsed by senior members of major IT organizations, such as IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, Intel, Accenture, IEEE, MITRE, SAP, CISCO, and HP. As the founder of Arcitura Education Inc., Thomas has overseen the development of curricula for the internationally recognized SOASchool.com SOA Certified Professional (SOACP) and CloudSchool.com Cloud Certified Professional (CCP) accreditation programs, which have established a series of formal, vendor-neutral industry certifications. Thomas has toured over 20 countries as a speaker and instructor for public and private events and regularly participates in SOA, Cloud + Service Technology Symposium, and Gartner conferences. More than 100 articles and interviews by Thomas have been published in numerous publications, including The Wall Street Journal and CIO Magazine.

Benjamin Carlyle is a founding developer of the Invensys Rail “SystematICS” services framework, and has worked for many years as a software developer, software architect, and systems engineer on railway projects worldwide. He has focused on integrating REST and services technologies since around 2004. His work is referenced in several books on Restful Web services and on microformats, he has presented at the International SOA Symposium, and has served on the technical committee for international workshops on RESTful Design. He is credited with helping inspire the RESTlet framework for Java, and coined the term “REST Triangle” to describe the structure of a REST uniform contract. He has a deep understanding of both the theory and practice of REST and related styles as well as broader software and systems architecture topics.

Cesare Pautasso is an assistant professor at the Faculty of Informatics at the University of Lugano, Switzerland. Previously he was a researcher at the IBM Zurich Research Lab and a senior researcher at ETH Zurich, where he also completed his graduate studies with a Ph.D. in 2004. His teaching, research, and consulting activities both in academia and in industry cover advanced topics related to Software Architecture, Service Oriented Computing, and emerging RESTful Web services technologies. His research group focuses on building experimental systems to explore the intersection between the REST architectural style and model-driven software composition techniques, business process management, and liquid, self-organizing service-oriented architectures. He is an active member of IEEE and ACM, where he has participated in more than 100 international conference/workshop program committees. He has started the series of International Workshops on RESTful Design (WS-REST) at the WWW conference and was the general chair of the 9th IEEE European Conference on Web Services (ECOWS 2011). He regularly referees for Swiss, EU, and international funding agencies.

Raj Balasubramanian is a senior technologist from the Business Process Optimization (BPO) team within IBM Software Group focused on delivering SOA/BPM/Cloud solution across industries. Depending on the needs of the customer he has played the role of an enterprise architect, system architect, or solution architect to deliver on the engagement at hand. Prior to the focus on BPO, he was a lead portal architect delivering portal solutions to medium and large enterprise as part of the Lotus brand. He has published numerous articles on IBM DeveloperWorks and speaks at industry conferences on a variety of topics. His interests are in distributed systems, applying Web constructs to solution design, and using formal models and analytics to reason about large systems. Raj is also pursuing a Ph.D. in ECE at University of Texas at Austin where he is applying machine learning and data mining techniques to networked data from social Web to human travel. His official profile is on http://raj.balasubramanians.com, which links to his various personas.