Web Services: yesterday's hype or tomorrow's promise?

Madeleine Wright, Lecturer, Department of Computer Science, Rhodes University, Grahamstown, South Africa 6140. Email: m.wright@ru.ac.za

Keywords

Web service, Representational State Transfer, Remote Procedure Call (RPC).

Abstract

The development of web services is at a significant stage, with much attention focused now on Service Oriented Architecture (SOA), which utilizes web services as a messaging system and as a wrapping mechanism for legacy applications. While there is still controversy over the multiplying and sometimes competing specifications which surround the generally recognized web-service standards of SOAP (no longer an acronym) and WSDL (Web Services Description Language), there has been significant uptake of a different model of web service: REST or Representational State Transfer.

This paper examines some of the historical influences underlying the core standards and attempts to explain the reason for recent instances of the adoption of the REST model. The paper suggests that the increasing complexity of the SOAP-based approach may be counter-productive and that the REST model offers a simplicity and an adherence to the architectural principles of the Web that is seen as both practical and appealing, not only for computing systems with large resources but also for mobile devices with fewer resources and more constraints.

The paper concludes with an attempt to predict the future uptake of the two web-service models, in the context of the Web as a system in which simplicity is paramount and over-complexity has often led to failure.

Acknowledgments: the author wishes to thank the Department of Computer Science at Rhodes University, particularly George Wells and Peter Clayton as supervisors of her Masters Thesis, for their support of this research. She also wishes to thank the sponsors of the Centre of Excellence in the Department for their financial support: Business Connexion, Comverse, Telkom, Thrip and Verso Technologies.