Designing level 3 behavioral RESTful web service interfaces

Abstract

A web service interface contains information about the names of the operations that can be invoked on the service and the input and output parameters of these operations. This information is not enough to facilitate service developer and consumer in understanding the behavior of the service. In the context of RESTful web services, the requirements of RESTful interface should also be met that are not fulfilled by just advertising the allowed operations on the resources. In addition, RESTful services take hypermedia as an engine of application states. Such services are defined to be at level 3 of Richardson Maturity Model(RMM). In this paper, we present an approach to model the structural and behavioral interface of a RESTful web service using UML class and UML protocol diagrams. These models lead to RESTful interfaces that conform to level 3 of RMM and describe the behavior of operations in terms of preconditions and post-conditions. These models facilitate the authentication mechanism and provide clear mapping to HTTP requests and responses. The generated contracts of methods can be published in an extended version of the WADL language and also used for documentation, stub generation, testing and monitoring purposes.

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Index Terms

• Human-centered computing

  • Human computer interaction (HCI)

    • Interaction paradigms

      • Web-based interaction

• Information systems

  • Information retrieval

  • Information storage systems

  • World Wide Web

    • Web applications

    • Web services