Putting the Web Services Specifications to REST

Web services have become a useful and effective way of sharing information over the World Wide Web. SOAP has become a popular way of providing Web services and has been the focus of the Web Services specifications. The Web Services specifications provide additional capabilities to Web Services such as security and policy exchange. Another popular form of Web services includes light-weight Web or RESTful Web services over HTTP. These light-weight Web services are currently not addressed by the Web Services specifications. In order to provide the same capabilities to RESTful Web services, the Web Services specifications will be used to extend the HTTP protocol to provide the additional capabilities. This work will show how the HTTP protocol can be extended using existing well defined specifications to provide extra capabilities such as security to RESTful Web services.