Web linking-based protocols for guiding RESTful m2m interaction

The Representational State Transfer (REST) style has become a popular approach for lightweight implementation of Web services, mainly because of relevant benefits such as massive scalability, high evolvability, and low coupling. It was designed considering the human-user as the one who drives service invocation and discovery. Attempts to provide machine-clients a similar autonomy have been proposed and recently, interesting discussion evaluate explicit semantics in the form of well-defined media types but introducing higher levels of coupling. We explore Web linking as a lightweight mechanism for representing link semantics and guiding machine-clients in the execution of well-defined choreographies and illustrate our approach with the OAuth and OpenId protocols exploring asynchrony and machine expectations as the interaction moves forward.