This document provides an overview of Representational State Transfer (REST); the service interaction profile (SIP) requirements for the Global Reference Architecture; and RESTful Resource Access Web (RAW) services specifications.
This technical document is based on Internet research by the authors; it provides a description and overview of the architectural style called Representational State Transfer (REST), which is a Resource Oriented Architecture (ROA) and a popular commercial alternative to SOAP-based Web services. REST is based on HTTP and the concept of uniform methods to access information as resources. The document notes that REST can be used in conjunction with several best practices in order to meet Global Reference Architecture requirements, however it notes that those solutions are not standardized and represent an ad hoc approach. The document states that many criminal justice community organizations are implementing security solutions that provide security and privacy enforcement using standard commercial gateway products such as the IBM DataPower appliance, and that those gateways may not support the specific security approach used for REST implementation. The document emphasizes that there are no consistent REST specifications that allow implementations to meet the service interaction requirements of the Global Reference Architecture, but efforts are under way to clearly document the common framework of the Global Reference Architecture and Global Federated Identity and Privilege Management (GFIPM). The document also highlights the possibility of building RESTful applications using Global Reference Architecture-compliant Web services, and provides high-level descriptions of each Resource Access Web (RAW) service specification as well as a description of how RAW Services work.