Qi4j has Identity a central concept, and the RESTful Access extension leverages these Identities into URIs as defined in the Roy T. Fielding's paper "Architectural Styles and the Design of Network-based Software Architectures" in chapter 5 "Representational State Transfer (REST)".
RESTful architectures is seen by many experts as being superior of the WS-* specification suite, when it comes to implement Service Oriented Architectures (SOA). It is said that REST is both more network friendly and robust (tolerant to failures), compared to the WS-* alternative. For instance, WS-* carries conversational state between requests, whereas REST depends on atomic requests and no state is kept on the server between requests.
The RESTful Access extension allows client to reach the many objects of a Qi4j application, without any additional work by the Qi4j server-side developer. Installing the extension is enough to obtain a good default behavior.
