SoD: Designing Architectures for Networked Applications: A REST-ful Approach

University Of California-Irvine, Irvine CA

Investigators

Abstract

The success of the World Wide Web has motivated many designers to examine and adopt the architectural style underlying the Web's interactions. This style, REpresentational State Transfer, or REST, excels at providing design guidance on how components (or nodes) should interact. REST provides little direct guidance, however, on how these nodes should be constructed. Without the necessary direction, designers frequently violate critical constraints of the REST style, such as stateless interactions and the critical resource/representation abstraction, when building their applications. The negative effects of these violations may only come into focus after application deployment. The initial focus of this research project, therefore, is on identifying and articulating teachable principles, practices, and supporting tools that enable the systematic and effective application of proven architectural styles, beginning with REST. The research broadens from this base to identify and provide design principles, architectural styles, and tools applicable to a wide category of decentralized and distributed applications. Through increasing levels of community involvement and assessment, particularly involving open-source software projects, this research enables a broad set of developers to effectively employ key design practices.