Identification of REST-like Resources from Legacy Service Descriptions

Service-oriented systems mainly follow two principles for accessing data and invoking back end applications: Remote Procedure Calls and Message-Orientation. However, a number of researchers and practitioners have criticized these paradigms as too complex and rigid. Instead, Representational State Transfer (REST) architectural style has lately gained significant attention as an alternative means for accessing services and data. RESTful HTTP systems depend on Uniform Resource Identifiers (URIs) to uniquely identify and denote data and services as “resources”. In this paper, we discuss a technique to analyze the descriptions of legacy data and services in order first, to model their roles and relationships and second, to use the discovered dependencies for extracting Unique Resource Identifiers and the available HTTP methods, so that these legacy service elements and data can be accessed using lightweight requests.