RESTful Web Services in Siebel IP16

Since reading the data sheet for Siebel IP16, a lot of us are curious about what is RESTful services. Well, till now Siebel did not provide support to REST web services. But what is REST and how different it is from SOAP?

SOAP is a protocol. It actually exposes logic as a service. It uses XML only to communicate data. SOAP is more secure than REST.

REST stands for Representational State Transfer. It exposes data as a service.

You can directly perform CRUD (Create, read, update, delete) operations directly on objects. It can use XML, JSON or other mime types. 

Consider this example. If you want to show Contacts in an external portal, you create a SOAP Web Service. In the web service, we call a Siebel Business Service or Workflow and query contact information. You are actually exposing a business service (logic) to external system. 

Using, REST, you call the Data object directly. While reading through Siebel Application Integration for Oracle Fusion Middleware Guide, I found a sample URI for REST. This uses Oracle Web Logic Server to communicate to Siebel App Server. 

http://myserver.mycompany.com:port/oracle-crm/api/rest/siebel/siebel.JNDI_ra_name/

Account_EMR/searchexpr=[IntCompName.IntCompFieldName] LIKE 'A*'

If you look at the above URI, you are requesting the URI with the search spec and the object (Account_EMR) to search directly. 

You are not calling a service, but data directly. This makes REST lightweight. Ideally, if you are exposing your data in a mobile app, REST will fit this perfectly than SOAP. If you look at Salesforce application, it uses REST services. Even the URL contains the object name and Id in the similar format. 

Coming back to Siebel, if you are wondering how to call REST services, REST services are called using HTTP requests. A request can be GET,PUT,POST,DELETE. A HTTP request can be called from Java, Javascript etc. You can find a lot of examples on internet about how to call HTTP request. 

Siebel RESTful API promises a lot. 

• It is going to support Business Component CRUD operations without the need to create IO at all. 
• It is going to support Business Service calls. 
• It also supports repository metadata CRUD operations. (That means you can edit a applet layout from another application)

This means Siebel is going to get more AWESOME. You can reflect whatever data you have in Siebel in a JAVA app, Android, iOS or Micorsoft app. 

I am eagerly waiting for REST API guide to come out. First use case would be asynchronous loading of an applet in a view using REST!! Will that be possible, lets see.