| RESTful Services and the Cloud |
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Most people will have stumbled across the concept of The Cloud – an extreme piece of hyperbole that claims to be the next generation of computing. Removing the hype, the Cloud promises an independence from owning and administering your own individual computing resources, allowing you to consume IT services (storage, processing power, or applications) from “somewhere else” - i.e. the Cloud – without having to know or worry too much about the mechanics. The approach introduces some new commercial models to the IT industry, which are of interest to consumers and service providers. Firstly, consumers of IT could only pay for the services they use with lower capital expenditure. From a service providers' perspective, this open the door to repeatable regular revenue streams and longer term contracts. From a software perspective, a well designed architecture provides the basis for this model of computing, irrespective of the use of the Cloud buzzword. In fact, the Web itself was and still is designed to support this type of resource consumption independent of the underlying complexities of the component parts. HTTP - the protocol at the heart of the web - is built on an architectural style called REST: “Representational State Transfer”. Those at the cutting edge of technology are embracing RESTful Web Services as an efficient and powerful approach to building n-tier application, Service Oriented Architectures (SOA) or as part of an Enterprise Application Integration approach to breath new life into existing applications. The recent interest in powerful RESTful services is two-fold:
One of the key drivers towards Cloud computing was to move away from increasingly complex and expensive commercial middleware packages. The RESTful design approach provides a fundamental building block in this pursuit of cheaper, more resilient, more scalable platforms. If you'd like to find out more, just contact us. |