Monthly Archives: July 2002

REST is Academic?

The “theory monster” rears its ugly head again. Clemens Vasters writes “Hence, the “I love HTTP” discussion (aka REST) is solely academic and of very little relevance for complex real-world designs now and even less moving forward — methinks.”. REST is the furthest thing from theory in existence; it is 100% practice. It is what… Read More »

Sam and Mark, Disconnect #2

Sam Ruby responds, “Note: I’ve said nothing about behavior… only about syntax. Where is the disconnect?”. As long as no behaviour is requested, then there is absolutely no disconnect. Excellent! I think we still have some terminology issues though. For example you said that WSDL is for specifying protocols. I don’t consider specifying the structure… Read More »

Sam and Mark, Disconnect #1

Sam and I are still disconnected, but we appear to have narrowed it done to this one key point. Must .. find .. way …. to explain. Time for an example. POST /some-uri/ HTTP/1.1 Host: example.org Content-Type: text/plain [blank line] 795 This is a client POSTing the data “795” to http://example.org/some-uri/. I consider this more… Read More »

WSDL and Protocols

Sam Ruby, “I still do, however, see value in perfectly clear protocol specifications, a role that WSDL fulfills”. Here’s how I see it. HTTP is the protocol, and no other protocols are required in order to get stuff done. I agree that WSDL does define protocols – application protocols in fact – but why is… Read More »

REST plus SOAP

I’m a few days late, but Sam Ruby posted his excellent REST+SOAP essay last week. I was surprised to see it not get more fanfare. I commented to Sam that I was concerned about this bit; Now add high level methods which take care of all composite create, update, and delete operations. Sam suggested to… Read More »

Can the "Web Method" be Derived?

An interesting discussion on xml-dist-app about implicit versus explicit use of the Web Method Specification Feature of SOAP 1.2. I guess I just have a hard time understanding why you’d want to hide the method, either by defining a default, or deriving it from the MEP in use. I mean, how else do you accomplish… Read More »

Bad Advocacy

I’m glad Sam Ruby is contributing to the SOAP/REST discussion. As a leader in the Web services space, his word goes a long way. I’m looking forward to reading his article. As for “bad advocacy”, I don’t believe that I’m an advocate for REST, at least in the REST/SOAP discussions. I see myself as more… Read More »