RESTful services getting traction in financial services

With data sources in financial services being so diversified and with many older systems still being completely stateless, RESTful services are making their way into this sector as a means for integrating all these data sources.

InfoQ has released a video from QCon in which Kirk Wylie reviews some of the most common problems, the video is fairly long but the slides sum up the main points quite well if you haven’t got time to watch the video. Another quite good introduction to REST, also from the QCon is one from Philip Ghadir which you can find here (jump to page 16).

Old legacy systems unable to handle state can still often mimic or produce XML in some form and with HTTP as a transport. So rather than trying to convert these old systems, it is suggested to follow the SOA approach and wrap them. It may also come as a really useful method of integrating the so often used office tools such as Excel since reading XML into these products is fairly straight forward;

Dim xmp as XmlMap
Dim xp as XPath
set xmp = Application.Workbooks(1).XmlMaps.Add(URL)
set xp = ActiveSheet.Range(“B1”).XPath
xp.SetValue xmp, “/Root/RepeatingElement/Element1”, , True
set xp = ActiveSheet.Range(“C1”).XPath
xp.SetValue xmp, “/Root/RepeatingElement/Element2”, , True

The overall demand for developers with experience in RESTful services seems to have increased quite a lot the past year;