Will this be the year that the Web development architecture known as REST invades the enterprise, derailing or fundamentally altering the orthodox approach to web services and service oriented architecture (SOA) that's been built up over the past several years?
There are plenty of REST enthusiasts who think it ought to happen – and many who would say it's inevitable – but even if there won't be an overnight revolution, the time may be ripe for enterprise folks to evaluate REST as an alternative or at least to considering how they might apply some of the principles behind it to streamlining their ongoing SOA efforts.
Representational State Transfer (REST) is a style of application architecture derived from the way the web works, and REST advocates argue that mimicking web-like patterns of interaction is a way of simplifying the development of network applications.
