Enterprise Resource Bus and Views in Restful Web Services

Abstract

Over the past few years RESTful Web Services (WSs) have gained immense popularity over the Web Service stack (WS*) to provide WS solutions. The WSs implemented using REST are lightweight and ideally suited for consumption for devices with limited processing capabilities like mobiles and tablets due to its dependence on HTTP. This enables the system architects to leverage the well-known capabilities of HTTP to develop their systems rapidly. However, this introduces the challenges of compromised security and unmanageable systems. This research presents a novel middleware architecture called Enterprise Resource Bus for Resource Oriented systems to tackle the issues of security, access control and resource management. The middleware architecture put forward in this research is focused on remedying these issues by abstracting the logic of access control and security to the concept of view resources to be managed in the middleware. This research draws inspiration from the middleware architecture implemented in SOA called Enterprise Service Bus. Since, the implementation of ERB is inspired from ESB we have emulated some functionalities of ESB and translated them to resource oriented architecture. In addition, this research also introduces the idea of views on resources inspired from the concept of virtual relations in relational databases to provide customized view resources based on user privilege/ role in the system to control access. The middleware architecture was tested for its overhead, scalability and security features as opposed to a REST Web Service without a middleware. It can be concluded from the evaluation results that with a small overhead a secure and highly manageable REST Web Services are achievable.