Massive kudos to the WS-Addressing WG (in particular Dave Orchard) for agreeing to drop reference properties from the WS-Addressing specification!! This addresses the most major(!) concern I had with the specification, and leaves EPRs as a means for bundling a URI with some state; cookies meet XML, as it were.
This decision means that a by-the-book EPR will contain only a single resource-identifying data element; a URI. In other words, the WG is adopting the REST constraint of a single resource-identifying data element. More concretely, it means that Web services will actually be encouraging the use of URIs for identifying things, rather than the old practice of using them as dispatch points behind which countless resources were hidden. This is HUGE, because in my experience, once you’ve adopted URIs, the use of http URIs and therefore HTTP (buh bye protocol independence) just naturally follow due to the massive network effects of the Web. The use of “hypermedia as the engine of application state” is the next obvious constraint for adoption after that.
It’s possible that with this decision, Web services might have just stepped inside the Web’s Schwarzschild Radius. Stay tuned.
