REST2SOAP: a Framework to Integrate SOAP Services and RESTful Services

Abstract

Nowadays, the mainstream of Web 2.0 Website services is in the REST style called RESTful Web service. RESTful services have been widely accepted by the public because of the usability and simplicity. Meanwhile, Web service technologies realize service-oriented architecture (SOA) successfully and are exploited in both industry and academia. Notably, service composition that can aggregate existing services into a new one delivers the most benefits of SOA through BPEL standard. However, BPEL cannot support RESTful services and integrate both Web 2.0 and SOA-based resources in a composite service directly. It means that it is costly or time-consuming to utilize RESTful services in an SOA-based application. Therefore, this paper presents a framework, namely REST2SOAP, to integrate SOAP services and RESTful services. REST2SOAP leverages WADL specification, and can wrap RESTful services into SOAP services semi-automatically. Using REST2SOAP, developers can create a BPEL service that combines SOAP, RESTful services and user interfaces simultaneously.