REST's uniform interface constraint (or uniform contract constraint) requires service capabilities be expressed in a way that is "standard" or consistent across a given context such as a service inventory. Instead of defining a service contract in terms of special purpose methods and parameter lists only understood by that particular service, we want to build up a service contract that leverages methods and media types that are abstracted away from any specific business context. REST-compliant service contracts are defined as collections of lightweight unique "resource" endpoints that express the service's unique capabilities through these uniform methods and media types.
To take a very simple example, consider how many places in your service inventory demand that a service consumer fetch or store a simple type such as an integer. Of course the business context of that interaction is critical to understanding what the request is about, but there is a portion of this interaction that can be abstracted away from a specific business context in order to loosen coupling and increase reuse. Let's say that we had a technical contract that didn't specifically say "read the value of the temperature sensor in server room A", or "getServerRoomATemperature: Temperature" but instead was more specific to the type of interaction being performed and the kind of data being exchanged. Say: "read a temperature sensor value" or "GET: Temperature".
What this would allow us to do is to have a collection of lightweight sensor services that we could read temperature from using the same uniform contrct. The specific service we decided to send our requests to would provide the business context to determine exactly which sensor we intended to read from. Moreover, new sensors could be added over time and old ones retired without changing the uniform interface. After all, that particular business context has been abstracted out of the uniform contract.
This is very much how the REST uniform contract constraint works both in theory and in practice. We end up with a uniform contract composed of three individual elements: The syntax for "resource" or lightweight service endpoint identifiers, the set of methods or types of common interactions between services and their consumers, and the set of media types or schemas that are common types or information sets that are exchanged between services and their consumers. By building up a uniform contract that focuses on the what of the interaction, free from the business context "why" we are free to reuse the interface in multiple different business contexts. This in turn allows us to reuse service consumers and middleware just as effectively as we reuse services, and to compose and recompose service compositions at runtime without modification to message processing logic and without the need for adaptor logic.
On the web we see the uniform contract constraint working clearly with various debugging and mashup tools, as well as in the browser itself. A browser is able to navigate from service to service during the course of a single user session, is able to discover and exploit these services at runtime, and is able to dynamically build and rebuild different service compositions as its user sees fit. The browser does not have to be rebuilt or redeployed when new services come along. The uniform interface's focus on what interaction needs to occur and on what kind of information needs to be transferred ensures that the services the browser visits along the way are able to be interacted with correctly with the individual URLs providing all of the business context required by the browser and service alike.
When we talk about service-orientation and service-orientated architecture, we move into a world with a different set of optimisations than that of the Web. There will clearly be cases where the uniform interface constraint significantly reduces complexity. Maybe we have a generic dashboard application. Maybe we have a generic data mining application. By interacting with different services and different capabilities using the same types of intraction and the same types of data these kinds of service consumers are significantly simplified the robustness of the architecture as a whole can improve. However, we start to run into some questions about the appicability of the constraint we we reach entity services within a true service-oriented architecture.
One of the key properites of a well-run SOA is that service logic and data housing is normalised. We usually end up with a layer of services that capture different kinds of important business entities and the operations that are legal to perform on these entities. Along with many of these entities we can expect to find special schemas or media types that correspond to them: An invoice type for an invoice service, a customer type for a customer service, a timetable type for a timetable service, etc etc.
As each normalised service introduces its own new media types, the unifrom contract constraint can quickly retreat. If we are talking about invoices then we are probably talking to the invoice service. If we are talking to the invoice service, and this is the only service that knows about invoices, then what other services are we supposed to have a uniform interace with exactly?
To me there are two basic answers to this. The first is that entity services are not the whole story. There is generally a layer of task services that sit on top of these entity services that will also need to talk about invoices and other entity types. Sharing a common interface between these task services will significantly increase the runtime flexibility of service compositions in most businesses. The second answer is that the uniform contract constraint is particularly applicable when service denormalisation does occur. This may occur within businesses through various accidents of history, but almost certainly will occur between businesses or between significant sectors of a business that operate their own independent service inventories.
Service-orientation generally ends at a service inventory boundary. Sure we have patterns like domain inventory where we all try to get together and play nicely to ensure that service consumers can be written effectively against a collection of service inventories... but ownership becomes a major major issue when you start to get different businesses or parts of a business that compete with each other at one level or another. If I am in competition with you, there is no way that your services and my services can become normalised. They will forever overlap in the functionality that we compete against each other in or with. This is where a uniform contract approach can aid service consumer development significantly, especially where elements of the uniform contract of a given service inventory are common to related inventories or comply with broader standards.
Consider the case where we want to have a service consumer do automatic restocking of parts from a range of approved suppliers. Our service consumer will certainly be easier to write and easier to deal with if the interface to supplier A's service is the same as the interface to supplier B's service. Such an interface will be free of the business context of whether we are talking to supplier A or supplier B, and instead will focus on the type of interfaction we want to have with each service and the type of information we want to exchange with the service. Moreover, once this uniform interface is in place we can add supplier C at minimal cost to us so long as they comply with the same interface.
The unifrom contract and the marketplace build each other up in a virtuous cycle, and eventually we see a tipping point as we saw on the early Web where the cost of adding support for the interface to services and to consumers falls drastically compared to the value of participating in the marketplace. The more people use a HTTP "GET" request to fetch data, the easier and more valuable it becomes to add support for that request to services and consumers. The more people use a html format to exchange human-readable data, the easier and more valuable it becomes to add support for that type of data to services and consumers. The same is true for more special-purpose media types and even for more special purpose interaction types.
At another level, consider the problem of trying to keep customer records up to date. Rather than trying to maintain our own database of customer details, what if we could fetch the data directly from a service that the customer owned or operated whenever we needed it? Again, this sort of interaction would benefit from having a uniform contract in place. Our service consumer may itself be our customer service, doing a periodic scrape of relevant data, but whatever form that consumer takes it is valuable for us to be able to grab that data over a uniform interface to avoid needing to develop special message processing logic for each customer we wanted data from. Likewise, it could become valuable enough to have one of these services that the customer would provide it for all of their suppliers. Having one interface in this case benefits the customer as well in not having to support a different interface for each of various suppliers.
The REST uniform contract constraint sets the bar of interoperability high: It sets the bar right where it is needed to select which service to interact with at runtime based on the appropriate business context. This is the right level to start to build up marketplaces for valuable services. It is also careful to separate the interaction part of the uniform contract from the media type part of the contract. This allows the separate reuse of each, and significantly increases the evolvability and backwards-compatibility of these interfaces.
While classical service-orientation at least in theory puts a limit on how valuable the REST uniform contract constraint can be, the real world's denormalised inventories and business to business scenarios put a premimum on the use the uniform contract pattern and on related patterns. In turn the uniform contract constraint puts the burden on people to come to agree on the kinds of interaction they with to support, and the kinds of information they wish to exchange so that machines are able to exchange that information without the need for excessing transformation and adaptor logic.
Benjamin