Comments on: REST vs. SOAP: Ops vs. Dev?

By: Mark Little

Mark Little — Thu, 23 Aug 2007 09:56:05 +0000

You're right. From an architectural perspective WS-* can learn a lot from REST and people are doing that (and vice versa). There are a few approaches (such as Message State Transfer) that try to meld the approaches. WS-Context is one WS-* standard that also tries to bridge the divide. I'm sure you've read it several times, for for anyone else interested, check out Jim Waldo's paper. Not on REST or WS-*, but still a good read.

By: billburke

billburke — Wed, 22 Aug 2007 21:20:37 +0000

Mark, yeah, i read a bunch of the historical (hysterical) stuff. Especially from Don Box. What I like about REST is that the fundamentals can be applied to a WS-* environment as well as REST.

By: Roy Russo

Roy Russo — Wed, 22 Aug 2007 20:28:14 +0000

Eric is shutting down your access right about now.

By: Mark Little

Mark Little — Wed, 22 Aug 2007 19:52:19 +0000

You might find http://webservices.xml.com/pub/a/ws/2001/04/04/soap.html interesting from a historical perspective. I remember being at the first OMG meeting when SOAP was introduced to the CORBA world and people were fairly frank about one of the main reasons it had been developed: to tunnel through firewalls. There were all the debates you'd expect at the time: how do you secure it? how do you make it transactional? I like REST. But then I also like WS-*. BTW, it's a few months old, but check out http://www.infoq.com/news/2007/07/wsrest if you didn't see it at the time.

By: Dilip

Dilip — Wed, 22 Aug 2007 15:17:17 +0000

Howdy Bill

Here is a REST epiphany run into by another popular blogger:
http://pluralsight.com/blogs/tewald/archive/2007/04/26/46984.aspx

If you browse to the blogs main page: http://pluralsight.com/blogs/tewald
you can also read posts that appeared after the link I mentioned above expanding on the said epiphany.

That blogger used to be a DCOM/COM+ wizard back in those days.