We’ve previously provided some insight into the process of translating between REST and SOAP in a tutorial on our Web site. In that tutorial, we demonstrated how our policy language lends itself to a simple way of defining the conversion process, making converting REST to SOAP a fairly trivial exercise. However, if you have tens or hundreds of existing SOAP services, translating them all to REST might seem somewhat daunting.

Luckily, a Layer 7 Gateway can also help to make that process considerably easier – and I’m going to show you how. I’ll be walking you through a wizard that makes it simple to (a) upload your Web services to the Gateway as WSDLs and then (b) customize how you want the REST version of each service to look.

First, you upload your WSDL.

Then, configure how you would like to present your REST interface.

Each operation can be customized with the type of HTTP method used.

Once you submit your configuration, you’re ready to go!

At the end of the wizard, sample HTML-based documentation is provided that can be used for presenting the REST endpoint to your clients. This documentation is the first step in presenting the details of your new RESTful API via the Layer 7 API Portal.

Here’s an example of the same operation above that was converted to a HTTP GET style.

Finally, we also provide a sample WADL based on the parameters that you specify.

Once you login to the Layer7 Policy Manager, you’ll find a predefined policy that does all the conversion from REST to SOAP.

From here, you can add any additional policy enforcement requirements as you see fit.