REST: From Research to Practice

This volume provides an overview and an understanding of REST (Representational State Transfer). Discussing the constraints of REST the book focuses on REST as a type of web architectural style. The focus is on applying REST beyond Web applications (i.e., in enterprise environments), and in reusing established and well-understood design patterns when doing so. The reader will be able to understand how RESTful systems can be designed and deployed, and what the results are in terms of benefits and challenges encountered in the process.

Since REST is relatively new as an approach for designing Web Services, the more advanced part of the book collects a number of challenges to some of the assumptions and constraints of REST, and looks at current research work on how REST can be extended and applied to scenarios that often are considered not to be a good match for REST.

This work will help readers to reach a deeper understanding of REST on a practical as well as on an advanced level.

Cesare Pautasso is assistant professor in the Faculty of Informatics at the Uni­versity of Lugano, Switzerland. Previously he was a researcher at the IBM Zurich Research Lab and a senior researcher at ETH Zurich, where he earned his PhD in 2004. His research group focuses on building experimental systems to explore the intersection of model-driven software composition techniques, business process modeling languages, and autonomic/cloud computing. His research, teaching and consulting activities both in academia and in industry cover advanced topics related to Software Architecture and Design, Self-Organizing Service Oriented Architectures and emerging liquid Web services tech­nologies. He is an active member of the ACM and the IEEE Computer Society where he has served on more than 100 conference and workshop program commit­tees. He has also started the series of International Workshops on RESTful Design (WS-REST) at the WWW conference. He has been the program chair and general chair of the IEEE European Conference on Web Services (ECOWS). He is a reviewer for several international funding agencies, including the EU FET-Open program. Since 2010, he is a member of the advisory board of Consilience International LLC. He is the lead architect of JOpera (www.jopera.org), a powerful RESTful service composition tool for Eclipse and the author of the BPEL for REST and BPMN for REST standard extensions. For more information, visit www.pautasso.info and follow him on @pautasso.

Dr. Wilde is the conference chair for the REST conference as well as Associate Adjunct Professor at Berkeley.