Resource-oriented architectures: BA ch 5

The chapter begins with an embarrassing fact that many organizations face today. It is very common for employees and internal users to search for their own information using the web even when there are internal search engines. Maybe it is just because we are so dependent on web that we are very quick on turning to it when we are looking for information. The sad true is that, most of the times this is not because of the Google’s dependency, but it just because it is easier to find information on the web than it is to find information internally. This is primarily because organizations focus more on the software and services and underemphasize the data. So the author makes the point that organization should focus more on finding ways to manage and reuse their data.

The paper defines resource-oriented architecture and all its advantages. ROA use logical names for named resources. This approach does not leak implementation details and provide a clear separation of the resources from the URL. The logical request is sent to a resource-oriented engine, which interprets it and turned it into a physical representation of the resource. That way, resources can be migrated and backend implementation changed without affecting the clients. Among other important properties of the ROA design choice are scalability, caching, and a focus on information.

I think there is a big advantage in putting data at the forefront. Making data available and easily accessible allows the backend system to cache results and make changes without affecting the clients. However, I am not sure how practical this can be in the real world. Many systems are based on the technologies described in this chapter as conventional web services or software centric architectures. It is will take a significant effort and will be very disruptive to change existing designs to ROA. Maybe ROA can be attractive for large organizations with massive amount of data that should be organized and decouple from clients to make them easily manageable and accessible internally.