Recommended Web Service Architecture Books/Sites?

Question

I'm in the position where I may be creating a new web service from scratch - without much pre-existing infrastructure to have to contend with. What resources are there that talk about the architectural aspects of deploying a web service? [Clarification: I'm not talking about an Enterprise SOA orientation here - rather setting up one family of services for the public.]

A first list of topics that I'd like to see covered are:

• SOAP vs. REST
• JSON vs. XML
• Relational Database Backed vs. SimpleDB backed vs. ?
• Scaling
• Availability
• Models for restricting access
• Models for throttling access

What would you recommend?

Answer 1

If you decide to use Microsoft technology (WCF) then you could check out the Microsoft Patterns and Practices group's online library of guidance.

They have a library located here as part of MSDN which deals with Web Service security, Enterprise Buses (obviously not applicable to you scenario) and PAG's own Web Service Software Factory.

Their main page is located here.

Otherwise, assuming you choose WCF it might be worth checking out further reading such as Juval Lowy's book on WCF, although I fear it may cover the implementation more than the theory and design facets.

Do you know roughly what technology platform you'll be working from?

Answer 2

I would recommend Restful Web Services. It's weel written, very complete and vendor agnostic. Also it has a fairly good coverage of both REST (with comparison to SOAP/WS-*), HTTP scaling, resource formats (JSON, XHTML, Atom, XML), security and service modeling.

If you have any specific scaling needs, then you might also want to read Building Scalable Web Sites. It will teach you everything worth knowing about etags, proxies, caching, edge computing and so forth. However if you are just starting out, then the Rest book I mentioned earlier will properly cover most people needs.