Jeremy Deane

Implementing RESTful Web Services

RESTful web services have become the preferred approach to synchronously integrating heterogeneous systems. The architectural style’s success is due in large part to its simplicity. Furthermore, REST is based on a small set of widely accepted standards, such as HTTP and XML and requires far fewer development steps, toolkits and execution engines than conventional SOAP web services.

Resource-Oriented Enterprise Service Bus

An Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) provides a platform for service provisioning. The core capabilities that enable provisioning across an enterprise include addressing, routing and transformations. Addressing is the ability to specify the location of a service regardless of transport. Service routing defines a message path across a number of servers or nodes and message content transformations are implemented using XML technologies such as XSLT and proprietary adapters.

Resource Oriented Architecture (ROA) goes beyond RESTful web services and provides a more extensible transport-independent foundation. Furthermore, ROA pushes the integration functionality to the edge of the network (as a URI), translating into better service management and scalability.

Resource-Oriented Concurrent Processing

Traditional concurrent development on the Java Platform requires in depth knowledge of threads, locks, and queues (oh, my!). Fortunately, new functional languages that run on the Java Platform, such as Scala, have made concurrent programming easier.

An alternate approach is to implement concurrent processes using a resource oriented computing (ROC) platform. At the heart of this ROC platform is a microkernel that allows processing to scale linearly as more CPUs are added. Consequently, developers are freed from the complexity of Java concurrency and functional programming.