REST in Practice

Chapter 12. Building the Case for the Web

THROUGHOUT THIS BOOK, we hope we’ve shown how the Web can be used to build real distributed systems, even “enterprise class” solutions for business-critical computing. But there’s a great deal of skepticism in computing circles about the “next big thing” because all the previous “next big things” haven’t lived up to expectations.

No More Silver Bullets

Think of the various panaceas we’ve been sold in recent memory: model-driven development, object request brokers, SOA, and Enterprise Service Bus—all have failed to deliver on their promise to make building robust systems easy and repeatable. If we position the Web as another silver bullet, it is similarly doomed to fail. So it’s important to understand that even though web-inspired systems are often an excellent solution, the Web is not a silver bullet and is not suitable for each and every problem domain.

Far from being an admission of failure, taking the time to understand when the Web will be helpful, and when it will not, is key to successfully deploying web services into your distributed computing environment.

Building and Running Web-Based Services

As system designers and developers, our primary concern is to deliver a working system that satisfies the functional and nonfunctional requirements placed upon it. In satisfying those requirements, we have to select frameworks and components to support our implementation and accelerate delivery.

Using commodity components and contemporary software ...