Exercise left for the student
Roy Fielding: Getting two components to communicate is a trivial process that can be accomplished using any number of toolkits (including the libwww ones).
It is fun seeing one of the primary authors of the HTTP spec lecture one of the original designers of a key portion of what is the dominant web browser on the Internet as to what exactly is and what exactly is not trivial.
Unsurprisingly, Roy gets a cool reception. I guess when the oracle has spoken, I'll just accept the dictum and move on. Indeed.
Meanwhile, today I saw a demonstration of some new Adobe tools that will allow GUIs to be generated from a schema, complete with validation code. The target audience for such tools is clearly different than Roy's. In particular, libwww is far beyond their abilities.
None of this invalidates REST. It merely recognizes that there are a number of non-trivial problems in getting two components to communicate, and that REST addresses in an admirable fashion one significant portion of the problem for a significant use case.
REST v SOAP - Recommended Reading
Roy Fielding: Getting two components to communicate is a trivial process that can be accomplished using any number of toolkits (including the libwww ones). Sam: It is fun seeing one of the primary authors of the HTTP spec lecture one of the original...Excerpt from iBLOGthere4iM at
Roy's right though, it is trivial. It's not trivial to add additional constraints to the communication though (e.g. statelessness, self-description), but basic communication is REALLY easy.
And you're damn right I'm zealous Dare. I can't believe that this misunderstanding (about what the Web is) has gone on as long as it has, especially by such a large number of people who should know better. FWIW, I can see it from the other side, most of the time. Heck, seven years ago I used to be on the other side, and was hard core CORBA fan. Don't believe me?
What I've been doing these past four years is explaining what I've learned since then; what the Web really is, and how it relates to architectures familiar to Web services folks like OMA/CORBA.
Posted by Mark Baker atP.S. here's how you "determine all the possible parameters for a google search URI without emailing someone at Google?"
Posted by Mark Baker atXML Conference day 1
I brought the PC laptop, thinking I could find a place to jack in somewhere, or maybe slum over a dial-up connection. Well, I found a place for the former -- plugged into the router at the "Internet Café" across from the...Excerpt from More Boom In The Room at
RESTing today ;-)
A number of excellent comments and clarifications about REST architecture... [more]Trackback from the iCite net development blog at
Uppity REST lovers
Everyone knows how much I respect Sam Ruby. A lot of the projects into which he's poured his time, energy, and veritably Buddha-like patience are so difficult and so thankless that they qualify as pure public-service rather than itch-scratching in my boo... [more]Trackback from Mod-pubsub blog at
RE: Exercise left for the student
Sam,
GUIs from schemas complete with validation code sounds a lot like InfoPath. In which case, it is orthogonal to a discussion on RESTful XML Web Services vs. RPC-style XML Web Services.
The REST folks have a bunch of good ideas, some of which I hope percolate down to the folks who work on XML Web Services at Microsoft. The biggest problem with REST is the overzealous nature of its advocates and their inability to see things from other people's perspectives, then again maybe it's just Mark Baker. Then again reading Roy's response it looks like he is also guilty of turning a couple of good ideas into a belief system [Yes, I am a Kevin Smith fan].
Roy says that there is no need for WSDL's with REST and I disagree. Sure there can be WSDL's for REST based architectures and quite frankly that is a hole in the Web architecture that there currently isn't an automated process for a user agent to tell what parameters or arguments a URI accepts (e.g. how do you determine all the possible parameters for a google search URI without emailing someone at Google?).
The problem with the REST advocates is that is that they trivialize or ignore the problems that the REST architecture does not solve instead of admitting it's short comings.
Message from Dare Obasanjo at