Web Things, by Mark Baker

Mark talks about document persistence and message transience. I would have agreed with that a few years ago, but as I’ve come to understand the value in self-description, I see that it is possible to have messages persist in meaning for as long as the documents which they encapsulate. A RESTful message is purely self-descriptive, while “SOA” messages are not (they don’t use a constrained interface, nor are they necessarily stateless), so perhaps that’s where the different view point comes from. But I think that persistent messages is an absolute requirement in the asynchronous future we all want to get too, because if you’re doing asynch – which is, of course, “without a clock” – then your message should mean the same thing whether it arrives now or ten years from now.