RESTful Web Service integration using Android platform

Abstract

Internet is providing the platform for accessing different kinds of services in a distributed and heterogeneous environment. Software components are available on Internet in the form of Web Services. Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) possesses various characteristics by executing Web Services using Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP). SOAP has certain limitations such as tightly coupled invocation, performance in terms of response data, non-uniform interface and no hyperlink support. These limitations can be resolved by implementing principles of Representational State Transformation (REST). REST is an architectural style implemented by resources known as RESTful Web Services. At present, light-weight RESTful services are dominating the development of services due to simplicity of RESTful architecture. Service access and invocation is simple in RESTful framework as it uses Uniform Resource Identifier (URIs) and Hyperlinks. In this paper, we explore the idea of RESTful Service Mashup by integrating individual Web Services which can satisfy end users' requirements. For this work, we propose a recursive algorithm. The implementation work is on Android 2.2 (froyo), API level 8 and above. It is supported on most of Android based mobile devices.