With the grand arrival of a bevy of futuristic and flexible information technologies, automated tools, optimized infrastructures, integrated platforms, and multifaceted devices, the world is bound to experiment and experience hitherto unknown software applications and services toward empowering businesses and people. With the faster proliferation of slim and sleek, handy and trendy smartphones, we are destined to have a dazzling array of easy-to-use and eye-catching mobile applications and services. With wearables, portables, fixed devices, handhelds, and wireless gadgets joining in mainstream computing, the application scope, size, speed, and structure are bound to escalate appreciably. To fit applications into every segment of devices, software developers across the world are expected to bring forth customizable, composable, and configurable applications by leveraging the potential and promising programming languages, platforms, toolkits, software-development methodologies, design patterns, and best practices. The software landscape is, therefore, expanding continuously with the utmost confidence and clarity. Hence, the rollout and the impact of pioneering software packages, homegrown applications, turnkey solutions, insightful platforms, and process-aware composite software are running on expected lines. That is, we are tending toward the software-defined world—software is the vital cog in humanity's bright future.

This book, especially this chapter, is dedicated to explaining the emerging techniques and tips to produce RESTful services and their corresponding APIs quickly and easily. This chapter has the following objectives:

• Software-defined and driven world
• Describing the emerging application types
• The REST paradigm for application modernization and integration
• The RESTful services for digital transformation and intelligence
• Best practices for REST-based microservices