Through the leverage of edge and digitization technologies and tools, all kinds of tangible elements in our personal, social, and professional environments are digitized. That is, these are becoming computational, communicative, sensitive, perceptive, responsive, and active. Digitized elements are also called smart objects or sentient materials. Further on, all sorts of embedded systems in everyday places (such as homes, hotels, and hospitals) are getting networked through a variety of communication and data-transmission protocols. Hence, the combination of digitized entities and networked embedded systems make our environments intelligent, which are typically self-, surrounding-, and situation-aware. Another noteworthy trend is that all of these empowered artifacts are increasingly integrated with remotely-held (cloud) applications, services, and data sources in order to be appropriately strengthened in their operations, output, and offerings. There are a number of integration and brokerage platforms, adapters, connectors, drivers, and plug-ins that enable device-to-device (D2D) and device-to-cloud (D2C) integration. This strategically-sound transition ultimately enables them to be innately smart in their actions and reactions. And this grandiose and technology-inspired transformation of everyday elements and entities in our daily environments leads to the timely formulation and delivery of service-oriented, event-driven, insight-filled, cloud-enabled, fault-tolerant, mission-critical, multifaceted, and people-centric services. The role of the powerful RESTful paradigm in building and providing these kinds of advanced and next-generation services is steadily growing.

This chapter is specially crafted to tell you all about the contributions of the RESTful services paradigm toward designing, developing, and deploying next-generation microservices-centric and enterprise-scale applications. It looks at how RESTful services that are capable of finding and binding with one another result in process-aware, business-critical, and people-centric composite services.

This chapter will cover the following topics:

• The need for service composition
• The various compositions methods (orchestration and choreography)
• The orchestration method
• The choreography method
• The hybrid version of orchestration and choreography towards smarter applications