RESTful mobile architecture for social security services: A case study

Nowadays, Web Services is the technological weapon-of-choice to implement Service-oriented Architectures (SOA). Companies like Google, Amazon, Twitter and Facebook offer Web Services to provide easy access to some of their resources, allowing third parties to combine, reuse and add value to their applications. In particular, mobile services promote the use of mobile devices as service consumers, with a remarkable growth in recent years. However, it is still challenging to identify the most appropriate architecture to integrate applications at organizational level in this new ecosystem of services and heterogeneous devices. Architectural decisions should be based on technical arguments, being crucial in the design of distributed system. This requires an unbiased analysis of the specific capabilities offered by services, mobile platforms and back-end options. Moreover, mobile services face different difficulties to spread in the market, which constrain their success. In particular, mobile devices have distinctive features (screen, battery, keyboard, etc.), which must be carefully considered in the development of mobile applications. For all these reasons, this work defines a mobile service-oriented software architecture based upon RESTful services. We analyzed architectural aspects and decisions to maximize desired quality attributes, particularly for the social security domain. These design decisions were then applied in a case study: a service-oriented architecture and mobile application for the social security provider SOSUNC, from the National University of Comahue.