RESTful Rails Development

Chapter 8. Microservices and Microapplications

In this chapter we are going to introduce some concepts regarding service-oriented architecture (SOA) and microservices architectures. We will develop a new API to discover possible thematic walks based on the user’s location. To find the user’s location we are going to build a different service that will return the user’s geographical coordinates given her IP address. The same service will also return a list of geotagged Wikipedia articles that we can use as points of interest for our Citywalks API. We will deploy the new API on OpenShift, a Platform as a Service (PaaS) solution by RedHat, and we will access it from our local machine.

Basics of SOA and Distributed Systems Design

When we talk of service-oriented architecture, we really mean a set of design patterns, both for software systems and architectures. Here, “service” refers to a self-contained unit of functionality that provides one or more actions using defined protocols instead of APIs. A protocol describes how services pass and parse messages using descriptive metadata.

SOA patterns and paradigms have been designed for large distributed systems, where every computer runs a number of services, and each service can exchange information with any other service in the network. SOA is designed to make it relatively easy for computers connected over a network to cooperate, allowing, among other things, the physical distribution of each service across a network of interconnected ...