Architectural Styles for Distributed Interoperability

Abstract

SOA and REST are the two main architectural styles used for distributed applications. Current SOA implementations use Web Services, which have a flexible service interface but lack resource structure. Current REST implementations use HTTP, with good structural support (through URIs) but fixed service interface, leading to a significant mismatch in modeling some application artifacts. In addition, current data description languages support distributed interoperability by schema sharing (XML) or predefined media types (JSON). This paper makes two main proposals: an architectural style, Structural Service, capable of combining resource structure with flexible services, and a distributed interoperability mechanism, based on structural compliance and conformance, which supports partial interoperability and reduces coupling between interacting services while ensuring that the interoperability requirements of the application are satisfied. Since current technologies do not readily support these proposals, the author developed a language and its execution platform that supports structural services and compliance and conformance.