The Resource-Oriented Architecture

Astonishingly, a prevalent point of view amongst protagonists of SOA is REST to be "just" a light-weight approach to web services. Rants pick on concepts and implementations at will, very few argumentations have a clear scientific foundation, some even discuss SOA and REST as an either-or decision. However, REST is just a manifestation of resource orientation. To return to a fruitful discussion and achieve progress, this paper outlines the origins of service orientation and resource orientation, providing a foundation for future agreement and new implementation approaches.