Question

Does REST constitute a Service Oriented Architecture?

Answer 1

This is a pretty philosophical and a very general question that is very likely to be removed, I’ll share my thoughts though.

There is a concept called Resource Oriented Architectures, defined by Richardson and Ruby in RESTful Web Services (O’REILLY 2007). I think the term is the best one to describe the most common approach to REST.

The main idea of ROA is defined by four concepts:

1. Resources
2. Their names (URIs)
3. Their representations
4. The links between them

and four properties:

1. Addressability
2. Statelessness
3. Connectedness
4. A uniform interface

When talking about RESTful Web Services, I think it’s good to stick to the term ROA and all information it carries.

As for SOA, the name is extremely vague. Some people think it should be reserved for Big (SOAP-based) Web Services only. Personally, I consider ROA a variant of SOA. The authors of the book, hovewer, refuse to make a final statement.

Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) is perhaps the least well-defined term of all, which
is why I called it out in Chapter 1 as a term I wasn’t going to use. I know of no litmus
test which indicates whether a given implementation is SOA or not.

Richardson & Ruby, RESTful Web Services, O’REILLY 2007

EDIT

The book quoted here has been made available under a Creative Commons License and is now possible to download free of charge.