Case Study On The Use Of Rest Architectural Principles For Scientific Analysis: Camera - Community Cyberinfrastructure For Advanced Microbial Ecology Research And Analysis

The advent of Grid (and by extension Cloud) Computing along with Service Orientated Architecture (SOA) principles have lead to a fundamental shift in the development of end-user application environments. In the scientific domain, this loosely coupled, multi-tiered software architecture has been quickly adopted as raw data sizes have rapidly grown to a point where typical user workstations can no longer perform the necessary computational and data-intensive analyses. A current challenge facing the design and development of SOA involves the management and maintenance of many loosely coupled service components. As with many large applications, "integration" is equally important as "coding". A resource orientated architecture style serves well in addressing these challenges. Here we present the CAMERA (Community Cyberinfrastructure for Advanced Microbial Ecology Research and Analysis) project as a case study for a SOA in scientific research environments.