REST: An alternative to RPC for Web services architecture

Currently most Web services architectures adopt RPC as their architectural style. But because of the complexity of RPC, there are bottlenecks of RPC-style Web services in Web-scale applications. REST not only can make full use of Web features, but also has the advantage of simplicity. So REST becomes a new alternative to RPC for Web services architecture. In this paper, at first the brief introductions of RPC and REST are provided. Then two kinds of architectural styles are analyzed and compared from the perspectives of scalability, coupling, and security. In the end the development trend of Web services architecture is prospected.