We really screwed up with the initial drafts we put up for the initial REST-* specifications on a number of levels.  First the specifications were written 1+ years ago by me for the messaging submission and 8+ years ago by  Mark Little.  Both of us, at the time were still trying to come to terms with what REST actually was (we still are) and how you design applications/systems/services around it.  As a result, those initial drafts, while they did follow the uniform interface principle of REST, weren’t very RESTful beyond that.  The thing is, I knew this!  I knew these initial drafts were crap.  I had planned to completely rework them and have draft 2 ready for when we announced.  So, when the press picked up Mark Little’s announcement of REST-* at JBoss World (It was actually only one bullet point on a “future directions” slide), the cat was out of the bag too early and we ended up seriously botching the announcement because we werent’ ready.

While the REST-* name itself was bound to cause friction within the hard-core REST community, when the lurkers on the rest-discuss mail list actually looked at these initial drafts, to them, their greatest fears were realized:  That what we were doing was just a re-hash of the same old architecture vendors have been rehashing over and over again for almost 20 years now (DCE, rehashed to CORBA, rehashed to WS-*) and that we were just repackaging our existing products and calling it REST to be buzzword compliant.  Even a few feared that we were trying to coopt REST itself which was totally incorrect.  We just want to figure out where middleware fits into this new model, specifically the middleware problems that Red Hat is used to solving.

So, we definitely are marketing morons, well specifically me.  I botched the announcement by not being ready.  All I can say is mae culpa.  If you’ve read my blog over the past few days you’ve seen me scurrying to catch up on writing the technical material I had always intended to write.  Hopefully you can see that we’re headed in the right direction in that we’re describing things that are much more RESTful than before.  All we can do is plug on…