Sunday, March 25, 2007

REST is the Betamax of Web Services

I while ago I blogged about REST. I was pretty excited about it at the time, it seemed to blow away a lot of the lava layers that have been accumulating around the SOAP protocol with a back to basics, or rather back to HTML approach that leverages a lot of the forgotten functionality of that protocol. OK, so should I be using it when my customers ask me to implement a Service Oriented Architecture? I think the answer has to be no. SOAP has gained far too much market share in the developer tools community. Especially in the Microsoft world, I’d be throwing away all the SOAP support built into the MS toolset and the .NET framework in particular that makes implementing web services with SOAP so easy. Also I’d be loosing any interoperability with other platforms, because with a RESTfull approach you’re basically designing your own protocol. It’s a shame, but sometimes you just have to go with the flow. Of course the world of IT (actually the world generally) is full Betamaxes. If the best tools always won, we’d be programming in Haskell, on BeOS running on a RISC machine.
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4 comments:

  1. Jo and Dave11:22 am

    REST is not dead....check out WOA, which is emerging as best practice from experience of implementing SOAs

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  2. Mike Hadlow3:42 pm

    Thanks jo and dave. I have to admit that that post was entirely from the perspective of a Microsoft Mort (me) and largely reflects that kind of view. I'm willing to be persuaded and I've just ordered a copy of RESTful Web Services by Leonard Richardson in order to educate myself better.

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  3. Mike Hadlow9:29 am

    Oh how wrong I was :)

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  4. Hadi Hariri9:33 am

    I'm not sure I understand to be honest. It's precisely the contrary. It's about embracing an infrastructure that is already there and has proven to work.

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