Web Things, by Mark Baker

Congrats to Eugene, Rich and crew!!
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A good comment from Chui Tey over in Steve’s comments.

Interfaces defining many kinds of messages imposes unncessary [sic] coupling, when what is required is for documents to be thrown over the other side of the wall, leaving the other party to decide what order to parse and process the document.

So in the spirit of the Zero/One/Infinity rule, what is he saying? Is it a) services should not have interfaces, b) services should share a common interface, or c) services should have whatever interface they want?

“Ah, those were the good old days”. Indeed. 1998 was a very good year. Coincidentally, webbroker was published the week after I attained “Web nirvana”. +1 to both of Mike’s points.
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Dave Orchard posted a pretty well argued treatise on what is, essentially, a defense of the right for Web services to not adopt the stateless interaction and more importantly, the resource identification constraints which are so important to the Web.

As I explained in my response, if Dave was arguing that Joe Architect should have the right to not follow these constraints (which of course, he already does), he’d have my full support, since in the small, that is often necessary.

However, in the large – when taking into account the value of participating in the information space that is the Web, and of leveraging rather than fighting its network effects – I cannot support him in his attempts to standardize known bad practice, even for non-Web systems.

I won’t bore you with yet another drawn-out description of “why”, since I think I’ve made that clear in the past; the Web is what Web services are trying to be, so why fight it?