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Overview of Siebel RESTful Services

Siebel RESTful Services are a set of Java Platform, Enterprise Edition (Java EE) services that make available a Siebel Repository instance or a Siebel enterprise instance to a connected application or system. It provides a Web service architecture that defines how you use Web standards, such as HTTP and URIs (Uniform Resource Identifier). Many Siebel Business Applications use SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol) Web services for integration and custom application development that require a wide range of Siebel business objects and business services. Siebel RESTful Services provide an alternative to SOAP where custom development and the user experience requires maximum scalability and stateless operation. While SOAP Web services provide a substantial set of architectural and application server demands, Siebel RESTful Services require no more complexity than what is required to deliver Web pages over HTTP.

REST (Representational State Transfer) is not a standard. It is a collection of resources that includes the following components:

• The URI for a Web service, for example:

  http://example.com/resources/cars

• The Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions (MIME) type of the data that a Web service supports. Although this type is typically JavaScript Object Notation (JSON), eXtensible Markup Language (XML), or Yet Another Multicolumn Layout (YAML), it can be any valid MIME type.
• The set of operations that a Web service that uses HTTP methods supports, such as GET, PUT, POST, AND DELETE.

You can use Siebel RESTful Services to do the following:

• Access Siebel Repository metadata even if you are not familiar with other Siebel development environments, such as Siebel Tools or Siebel administrative interfaces.
• Generate applications that interact with Siebel CRM user data.

Benefits of Using Siebel RESTful Services

One of the benefits of using RESTful services is that a session is not necessary so the overhead is lower and the performance may be better. When an application does not need to maintain a state between steps such as a shopping cart application would, and the interaction is supposed to be a small and quick one such as updating, creating or deleting a single record, RESTful services make sense. For more complicated interactions with the Siebel application web services are the preferred method.