Affiliation:
1. Instituto Superior Técnico, Universidade de Lisboa, Portugal
Abstract
The interaction of applications in distributed system raises an integration problem that application-developing methods need to solve, even if the initial specifications change, which is actually the normal case. Current integration technologies, such as Web Services and RESTful APIs, solve the interoperability problem but usually entail more coupling than required by the interacting applications, since they share data schemas between applications, even if they do not actually exercise all the features of those schemas. The fundamental problem of application integration is therefore how to provide at most the minimum coupling possible while ensuring at least the minimum interoperability requirements. This chapter proposes compliance and conformance as the concepts to achieve this goal by sharing only the subset of the features of the data schema that applications actually use, with the goal of supporting a new architectural style, structural services, which seeks to combine the advantages of both SOA and REST.