Analyzing Consistency of Behavioral REST Web Service Interfaces
This addresses design reliability for developers of behavioral REST web services, but it is incremental as it builds on existing UML-based modeling approaches.
The paper tackles the problem of ensuring consistency between resource and behavioral models in REST web service interfaces by using state invariants and reasoning tools, showing that unsatisfiable invariants indicate no valid service implementation.
REST web services can offer complex operations that do more than just simply creating, retrieving, updating and deleting information from a database. We have proposed an approach to design the interfaces of behavioral REST web services by defining a resource and a behavioral model using UML. In this paper we discuss the consistency between the resource and behavioral models that represent service states using state invariants. The state invariants are defined as predicates over resources and describe what are the valid state configurations of a behavioral model. If a state invariant is unsatisfiable then there is no valid state configuration containing the state and there is no service that can implement the service interface. We also show how we can use reasoning tools to determine the consistency between these design models.