Preface

The inherent advantages of the use of web services in computer systems development are the same that create the need for security management over them. Today, we can say that no company is able to work in complete isolation, without the need to interact with others and share and consume information. Furthermore, this is the most important asset of any company. For this reason, these requirements are also common between lines of code. This book presents real scenarios with applicable solutions, leading you by the hand all the way, so you can easily learn solutions and implementations that will resolve the most common needs that can arise.

RESTful web services offer several advantages over those based on SOAP. For example, when handling data types, depending on the programming language or the libraries you use to create them, you can find inconsistencies when using empty values ("") instead of NULL. Also, you may find difficulties in mapping complex objects and compatibility issues in file transferring when using different versions of libraries to create/consume the web service. In certain situations, even when consuming a web service created in Java from a .NET application, it ends up creating a service implemented in Java in the middle of both. This does not occur in RESTful web services, since in this case, the functionality is exposed through HTTP method invocations.

In order to protect information, the world of securities has many features that help to achieve this. For example, understanding how some issues such as authentication and authorization assist in the implementation of any selected mechanism, where the main objective is to make our applications safer and secure, is essential. The selection of each of the different ways to secure applications goes along with the problem you want to resolve; for this, we show usage scenarios for each of them.

Many times, we have seen large organizations spend time and effort in creating their own implementations to handle securities rather than using the standard that has already resolved what we need. Through the knowledge that we want to share with you, we hope to avoid this process of reinventing the wheel.