Today, Representational State Transfer (REST) is becoming more and more important. RESTful web services are an alternative to Remote Procedure Call technologies like SOAP and WS-* services. There are many frameworks for implementing RESTful applications, but there is still a lack of support for the early phases of the development process, particularly analysis and design. For building formal models of RESTful applications an appropriate metamodel is needed. After analyzing existing approaches and techniques a first version of such a REST metamodel is presented and used to model an example application. Beside enabling modeling, such a metamodel offers a vocabulary for REST in practice and the basis for model driven development.
Starting with RESTful design is a difficult task -even more if the designer has a RPC or object-oriented background. To support the adaption from RPC-to REST-oriented thinking, we propose RESTify, a straightforward procedure model to redesign a RPC-oriented interface into a hypermediaenabled REST interface. RESTfiy uses a WSDL document of an existing SOAP service and consists of three iterations. The result of each iteration is an enhanced version of the preceding one concerning the REST constraints and is meant to be implemented as a HTTP service. Beside the technical result of the process and the design of a RESTful interface, the developer becomes acquainted to the main elements of a RESTful design, the constraints and their application. The results of the evaluation, using a prototypical web application and public SOAP services, are promising.
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