Web Things, by Mark Baker

Now don’t get me wrong, I do appreciate the bevy of pro – or at least neutral – REST commentary in the recent discussion. But I just can’t get excited about the “moderate” conclusions such as this from Dare Obasanjo;

If you know the target platform of the consumers of your service is going to be .NET or some other platform with rich WS-* support then you should use SOAP/WSDL/WS-*. On the other hand, if you can’t guarantee the target platform of your customers then you should build a Plain Old XML over HTTP (POX/HTTP) or REST web service.

I mean, that looks fine and dandy – as did Don’s conclusions – until you realize that the architectural properties of the resulting system aren’t a factor in the decision.

Oops! This is not progress. This is not principled design.

Tags: soap, soa, rest, webservices.