Modeling RESTful Applications

Today, Representational State Transfer (REST) is becoming more and more important. RESTful web services are an alternative to Remote Procedure Call technologies like SOAP and WS-* services. There are many frameworks for implementing RESTful applications, but there is still a lack of support for the early phases of the development process, particularly analysis and design. For building formal models of RESTful applications an appropriate metamodel is needed. After analyzing existing approaches and techniques a first version of such a REST metamodel is presented and used to model an example application. Beside enabling modeling, such a metamodel offers a vocabulary for REST in practice and the basis for model driven development.