Chapter 7
Designing and Building Data Services
What's In This Chapter?
- Understanding web services
- Choosing between SOAP and REST
- Designing services for mobile applications
- Optimizing services for mobile data access
- Creating logical resource endpoints
- Extending your services into the enterprise
Now that you've written your shared application, and built one or more containers for your targeted platforms, you need a way to get information from both your enterprise databases and other back-end systems for consumption on your mobile devices. In this chapter you learn how to build web services that are optimized for mobile applications. You explore examples of both traditional SOAP and RESTful techniques and learn to build services that mirror your application design to best serve data to your application. Finally, you examine techniques for customizing and limiting the volume of data returned to your application according to mobile best practices.
Understanding Web Services Principles
Web services and Service Oriented Architectures (SOAs) have become ubiquitous in most large companies. The proliferation of web applications over the past decade or two has resulted in the need for integration between heterogeneous systems in most enterprises. Because SOAs are based upon clear standards with implementations available for the most popular enterprise development frameworks and technologies, they have become the standard for moving information around most organizations.
Generally, two ...
