According to Michael Curry, Forrester has a report on REST vs. SOAP which concludes saying basically that SOAP is a better long-term bet. First of all, the debate isn’t REST vs SOAP, it’s REST vs. SOA. SOAP can be used in the context of many architectural styles, and the SOAP spec itself says basically nothing about which should be used; though it does have explicit support for RPC and REST (by virtue of some design decisions made regarding the HTTP binding, thanks to yours truly). Also, Forrester’s claim that REST proponents rag on SOAP is backwards; we like SOAP, mostly. We just don’t like SOA.

Also, apparently the principle argument against REST is that it lacks standards support. Seriously?! Ever heard of URIs and HTTP? You know, two of the most wildly successful standards in the history of distributed computing? How one can compare WS-* with 100s of millions of deployed and currently-interoperable servers and clients, and then conclude that the latter suffers from a lack of standards support, boggles my mind.

Michael also adds his own critique;

Randy makes some good points on the standards issue that I failed to bring up. He doesn’t bring up the fact that REST breaks the MVC paradigm, however.

Who knew that MVC was a benchmark by which large scale distributed systems are evaluated? Back to the drawing board for me! 8-)

Trackback

no comment until now

Add your comment now