Evaluating REST architectures—Approach, tooling and guidelines

• We propose a guide to aid architecture evaluation activities in REST-based systems.
• A proof-of-concept demonstrates how the guide can help architecture evaluations.
• Results from a survey demonstrate the suitability and utility of the proposed guide.
• A Web tool was developed to facilitate the usage of the evaluation guidelines.

Architectural decisions determine the ability of the implemented system to satisfy functional and quality attribute requirements. The Representational State Transfer (REST) architectural style has been extensively used recently for integrating services and applications. Its adoption to build SOA-based distributed systems brings several benefits, but also poses new challenges and risks. Particularly important among those risks are failures to effectively address quality attribute requirements such as security, reliability, and performance. A proved efficient technique to identify and help mitigate those risks is the architecture evaluation. In this paper we propose an approach, tooling, and guidelines to aid architecture evaluation activities in REST-based systems. These guidelines can be systematically used along with evaluation methods to reason about design considerations and tradeoffs. To demonstrate how the guidelines can help architecture evaluators, we present a proof of concept describing how to use the guidelines in an ATAM (Architecture Tradeoff Analysis Method) evaluation. We also present the results of a survey conducted with industry specialists who have performed architecture evaluations in real world REST-based systems in order to gauge the suitability and utility of the proposed guidelines. Finally, the paper describes a Web tool developed to facilitate the use of the evaluation guidelines.