Red Hat is seeking REST standardization through an effort it is calling REST-*. This could be a counterpoint to the alternative WS-* specifications for Web services.

With REST-* (pronounced rest star), Red Hat plans to work with main vendors that includes IBM and Microsoft, to define standards or recommendations for REST-based system integration.

“I think this actually is a very, very important thing for us in the future because REST is not going to go away,” said Mark Little, CTO of the JBoss unit at Red Hat. He was presenting at the JBoss World conference in Chicago.

According to Little WS-* Web services have become complex. He also thinks that REST may be a better way of doing Internet-scale integration, but he feels that one of the problems of REST is it lacks clear guidelines, for enterprise capabilities, such as security, transactions and high availability.

Mark Little also mentioned that REST is essentially the architectural principle on which the Web is based.

Red Hat also has a community-based open source project, called the Savara Project, to enable testable architectures or process governance. “It’s essentially a way of defining the distributed interactions in a distributed system and testing that the implementations conform to your expectations,” said Little.

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