Formalization and Verification of REST Architecture in Viewpoints

Abstract

Representational State Transfer (REST), as a promising software architecture style, has been used in large scale since proposed. However, there still exist considerable confusions about the REST architecture, which may lead to inappropriate application. We apply formal method CSP in modeling the REST architectural style to give a comprehensive explanation of it. We partition the architectural description into three separate views: process view, connector view and data view, each capturing one architectural element and related properties of the architecture. Furthermore, REST constraints can be described in our models and validated by the model checker PAT. Besides, we focus on the relation between the stateless constraint and resource state, as well as the uniform interface constraint and hypermedia-driven property. The related properties of them are also verified in this paper.