Brian Schalme

History of Representational State Transfer

Roy Fielding coined the term Representational State Transfer (REST) in his 2000 doctoral thesis Architectural Styles and the Design of Network-based Software Architectures. In essence, he argues an API should use the existing HTTP verbs, and it should focus on representations of business objects rather than backend implementations. An example might be to model a Customer object the way the business knows and interacts with it rather than how it’s stored on the customer database table. In this post I’ll describe how to design an effective REST API using some of the concepts Fielding pioneered.

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Most software development teams have one person with the role of Architect. Small teams of one or two people may not, but someone is thinking about architecture. This person’s title may be Solution Architect, Application Architect, Data Architect or Systems Architect. For now let’s consider all of them under the collective name of Software Architect. In this article I’ll talk about the characteristics of a good architect, and I’ll explain what a software architect does. I’ll also address the evolution of the role of software architect, and where it is today. By the end I hope you’ll have an answer to the question “so what does a software architect do anyway?”

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What is it?

The pipeline architecture is one of the most common architecture styles used in designing software systems. Also known as pipes and filters, it consists of a series of discrete steps performed in a predictable sequence. This is different from the model-view-controller pattern in a layered architecture. In this article I’ll define what it is and when to use the pipeline architecture style.

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A layered architecture style is one where the presentation, business and persistence layers are bundled into one deployment unit. In this article I’ll discuss what it is, and point out the situations where you would choose to adopt it.

This is one of a series of articles where I am going to discuss each of these architecture styles: Layered, Microservices, Pipeline, Microkernel, Service-Based, Event-Driven, Space-Based, and Orchestration-Driven Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA). I’ll provide some insights based on my experiences, and I’ll mention some of the Java / JVM frameworks that support the style we’re talking about.

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