I was wondering how long that would take. 8-)
And here I was thinking 2004 was supposed to be it. Or was that 2003? It’s hard to keep track, except that I’ve noticed that it always seems to be next year… at least until folks just get tired of waiting.
Yet another good thing about the Web; it already had its “year”, ten years ago.
I don’t think people are embracing REST services because of architectural purity (the rest of the Web isn’t pure REST, so I don’t know why this would be). Rather, they embrace it because it’s easier in a lot of cases. There is no reason that SOAP couldn’t be the same, except that toolkits hide raw XML and you have to know how to get it.
To the first point, yes, certainly, they embrace it because it’s simpler and easier. Absolutely. As we’ve seen, they often screw up, but even then it’s very often preferable to SOA.
To the second point, there actually is a critical reason (in addition to the “hide the XML” problem) why SOA/WS cannot be as simple as REST; that the architectural constraints which induce the bulk of the simplicity in REST (uniform interface, self-description), are eschewed by SOA/WS. Isn’t it ironic that their raison d’etre – service specific interfaces – is the reason they will fail to see widespread deployment? I think so. 8-)