RESTful service composition at a glance: A survey

Abstract

In the last years, Web Service composition has undoubtedly become the most promising way to integrate business-to-business applications. However, the industry and the academia often disagree on materializing current solutions, which are based on either SOAP Web Services or semantic Web Services. Besides, any service composition mechanism entails multiple and complex factors such as adaptability, scalability and lightweightness. Recently, RESTful services have shown their potential to compose reliable and visible Web-scale applications based on the so-called mashups. In this paper, we survey a comprehensive set of RESTful composition approaches, i.e., the most promising in their area, totaling 29 approaches. Then, we propose two sets of features to analyze, characterize and compare such approaches: features inherent to SOAP services composition approaches and RESTful services composition features. Lastly, we discuss research challenges and open research problems in the area.