Usability of composing REST services on smartphones

Abstract

REST services are generally more appropriate for smartphones than their counterpart, SOAP. However, the flexibility, scalability and performance gained through REST services are never enough to meet the goal of addressing the complex and mobile relationships among people. That is, usability of the REST service must be enhanced for involving none-programmers to compose services on their smartphones thereby address the complex and mobile relationships among people. In this paper, we explored the factors influencing usability of the REST web service on the smartphone environment. Accordingly, the breadth and depth of URIs namespace, number of request parameters and response fields, and the naming of URIs, parameters and response fields are found to be the factors that influence the usability of composing REST services on smartphones.