research-article

Restful web services vs. "big"' web services: making the right architectural decision

Authors:

Cesare Pautasso,

Olaf Zimmermann,

Frank LeymannAuthors Info & Claims

WWW '08: Proceedings of the 17th international conference on World Wide Web

Pages 805 - 814

https://doi.org/10.1145/1367497.1367606

Published: 21 April 2008 Publication History

Abstract

Recent technology trends in the Web Services (WS) domain indicate that a solution eliminating the presumed complexity of the WS-* standards may be in sight: advocates of REpresentational State Transfer (REST) have come to believe that their ideas explaining why the World Wide Web works are just as applicable to solve enterprise application integration problems and to simplify the plumbing required to build service-oriented architectures. In this paper we objectify the WS-* vs. REST debate by giving a quantitative technical comparison based on architectural principles and decisions. We show that the two approaches differ in the number of architectural decisions that must be made and in the number of available alternatives. This discrepancy between freedom-from-choice and freedom-of-choice explains the complexity difference perceived. However, we also show that there are significant differences in the consequences of certain decisions in terms of resulting development and maintenance costs. Our comparison helps technical decision makers to assess the two integration styles and technologies more objectively and select the one that best fits their needs: REST is well suited for basic, ad hoc integration scenarios, WS-* is more flexible and addresses advanced quality of service requirements commonly occurring in enterprise computing.

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Index Terms

Restful web services vs. "big"' web services: making the right architectural decision

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Published In

cover image ACM Conferences

WWW '08: Proceedings of the 17th international conference on World Wide Web

April 2008

1326 pages

ISBN:9781605580852

DOI:10.1145/1367497

General Chairs:
Jinpeng Huai
Beihang University, China
,
Robin Chen
AT&T Labs, USA
,
Hsiao-Wuen Hon
Microsoft Research Asia, China
,
Yunhao Liu
HK University of Science and Technology, Hong Kong
,
Program Chairs:
Wei-Ying Ma
Microsoft Research Asia, China
,
Andrew Tomkins
Yahoo! Research, USA
,
Xiaodong Zhang
The Ohio State University, USA

Copyright © 2008 ACM.

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Published: 21 April 2008

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WWW '08: The 17th International World Wide Web Conference

April 21 - 25, 2008

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https://doi.org/10.36676/j.sust.sol.v1.i4.26
Schramm MHeck MBecker C(2024)SmartEdge: Towards Configuring Complex Applications in Mobile Edge ComputingProceedings of the 2nd International Workshop on Middleware for the Computing Continuum10.1145/3702635.3703901(13-18)Online publication date: 2-Dec-2024
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