REST in Practice

Chapter 3. Basic Web Integration

UNDERSTANDING EVERY ASPECT OF THE WEB’S ARCHITECTURE can be a challenging task. That task, coupled with the everyday pressure to deliver working software, means we are often time-poor. Fortunately, we can start to use some web techniques immediately, at least for simple integration problems.

Warning

Although the techniques we cover in this chapter are simple, they come with an enormous health warning. If you find yourself using them, it’s probably an indication that you should reconsider your design and use some of the techniques described in later chapters instead.

We will learn more sophisticated patterns and techniques as requirements become more challenging. The approaches we’re going to consider in this chapter are simple to pick up. For now, we’re going to focus on two simple web techniques for application integration: URI tunneling and Plain Old XML (POX). These techniques allow us to quickly integrate systems using nothing more than web servers, URIs, and, for POX, a little XML.

Lose Weight, Feel Great!

Many enterprise integration projects (wrongly) begin with middleware. Architects invest significant efforts in making sure the middleware products they choose support the latest features for reliable messaging, security, transactions, and so on. The chosen platform is then dropped onto development teams, whose working life is subsequently spent trying to figure out what to do with all the software they’ve been told to use.

Of course, ...