Book excerpt: The Definitive Guide to Building Web-Centric SOA with REST The World Wide Web is based on the most successful technology architecture in history. It has changed how we view, access, and exchange information and, with the advent of REST, it has also provided us with compelling ways to build and improve automation solutions. REST provides a great deal of guidance to ensure that an architecture and its automation logic are technically sound, though it is still your responsibility to build services that actually add value to your business. SOA with REST is the first comprehensive tutorial and reference for designing and building RESTful services as part of service-oriented solutions and in conjunction with service-oriented architecture (SOA). This book demonstrates that REST is not only a suitable medium for building truly service-oriented solutions, but also that the service-oriented architectural model is a necessary foundation for REST technology architectures to realize their full business potential. The authors provide thorough mapping of REST constraints and architectural goals with service-orientation principles and SOA characteristics. Using real-world examples, they show how to leverage REST’s simplicity, flexibility, and low overhead without compromising the power or manageability of service-oriented solutions and architectures. This ebook will be valuable to IT architects, developers, and any practitioner seeking to use SOA and REST together.