RESTful Web Services: The Resource-Oriented Architecture

This paper outlines a concrete RESTful architecture: the Resource-Oriented Architecture (ROA). The ROA is a way of turning a problem into a RESTful web service: an arrangement of URIs, HTTP, and XML that works like the rest of the Web, and that programmers will enjoy using. This paper introduces the moving parts of the Resource-Oriented Architecture: resources (of course), their names, their representations, and the links between them. It explains and promotes the properties of the ROA: addressability, statelessness, connectedness, and the uniform interface.