A framework for self-descriptive RESTful services
Luca Panziera, Flavio De Paoli · 2013
REST principles define services as resources that can be manipulated by a set of well-known methods. The same approach is suitable to define service descriptions as resources. In this paper, we try to unify the two concepts (services and their descriptions) by proposing a set of best practices to build self-descriptive RESTful services accessible by both humans and machines. Moreover, to make those practices usable with little manual effort, we provide a software framework that extracts compliant descriptions from documents published on the Web, and makes them available to clients as resources.