Resource-oriented architecture

Resource Oriented Architecture (or, ROA) is the architecture of the [1] web. Based on the seminal concept known as [2] REST, or Representational State Transfer (see Roy Thomas Fielding's Doctoral Thesis "Architectural Styles and the Design of Network-based Software Architectures" [3]), this architecture proposes that the central abstraction on the web is a resource.

The first published notion of Resource Oriented Architecture seem to have been the blog entry, posted on August 8, 2006 ([4] Replacing Service Oriented Architecture with Resource Oriented Architecture). Following a rather lively debate around this newly introduced concept, an important book ([5] "RESTful Web Services", by Leonard Richardson & Sam Ruby) was published in May 2007.