Service Orientation and APIs

Now that we have explained many principles and several methods, we are going to move on to chapters that will be a bit more technical and thus will show more examples being applied to our demonstration application. In this chapter, we will explain the notion of service from the IT perspective and will try to place services in the history of IT to give you a good understanding of what they are for and what they have brought to the industry. There are still shortcomings, of course, but web-oriented architecture and web services in general bring huge value to the software industry when they are correctly designed (which, sadly, is far from being common).

After this examination of the history of services, we will detail the characteristics of a good service-based architecture (I am not using the expression Service-Oriented Architecture for a precise reason, as you will discover shortly) and explain how their current evolution, namely REST APIs, can be of...