Web Things, by Mark Baker

In the comments on an inquisitive blog post by David Megginson, Mike Champion asks;

Show us the WS-* success stories, show us the secure, reliable and truly RESTifarian success stories, and let the world judge from the evidence.

to which I responded;

Mike – empirical evidence is wonderful to have of course, but it’s also extraordinarily costly to come by. It’s also unnecessary, since we’ve had at our disposal for years (since Perry & Wolf’s “Foundations” paper in the early 90s) a method of evaluating software architectural styles for their suitability for any particular task in any particular environment. Applying that method to SOA/WS tells us a number things, most importantly that it doesn’t scale across trust boundaries (which I’ve been saying for many years, and folks now seem to be acknowledging viz a viz WS use behind the firewall). That same method also tells us which other styles do (ones that adopt interface constraints, of which REST is just one example). This whole debate is not much more complicated than that.

I just thought that worth replicating here. Of course, that extraordinary cost I referred to has already been born out over the past few years by Web services ISVs, their customers, and others, so there should be an abundance of evidence for Mike.

Tags: soap, soa, rest, softwarearchitecture, webservices.