Towards a View-Based Process for Designing and Documenting RESTful Service Architectures
Résumé
Representational State Transfer (REST) is an architectural style for service-based design. Regarded to be used in massively distributed and loosely coupled hypermedia systems, REST has been the de facto architecture style for REST-based web services (called RESTful services). Besides business functionality, RESTful services should address quality attribute requirements, which are commonly described in scenarios (textual descriptions of how to achieve such attribute in the system's context). However, to properly mapping scenarios into architectural elements is a non-trivial task. Furthermore, architects often fail to document adequately the design decisions taken during such mapping. These issues can result in low-quality RESTful services. In this paper, we present a view-based process that provides mechanisms to represent quality attribute scenarios as concrete design decisions that can be later used in the design of RESTful service architectures.