Elias has noticed that my blog has fallen silent recently, and suggests that REST’s victory over WS-* has something to do with it.
He’s right.
I haven’t had much contract work the past few weeks, but have been helping a couple of startups. But the main reason I don’t blog is that my curmudgeonly style really only works when I’m the lone voice, arguing for the unpopular-but-superior solution. Now that the arguments I’ve been making for the past seven or so years are finally being recognized as superior, I’m sure I’d come off as just plain mean if I were to go after anybody who said that they were sticking by WS-* (something about kicking a horse when it’s down).
What comes next for me and this weblog then?
Something I considered doing a couple of years ago was a regular “Ask Mark” piece, where I’d publish one of the many REST/Web questions I get via email. I’d been answering those privately for years, but perhaps I could now do so on condition that I can publish them (though few are really interesting).
Another thought was covering REST/Web esoterica. There’s an abundance of interesting topics to cover on the fringes of REST and the Web. Yet another was a retrospective of some of the more heated battles over the past years, on weblogs and mailing lists.
Let me know what you’d like to see me cover.
Write posts of each kind just to mix things up. They are all potentially interesting topics.
Issues w/r/t ‘partial updates’ and updates affecting multiple resources come up a lot.
Another issue is why some of these ‘REST’ APIs we use, like Flickr, aren’t following RESTy patterns, and how they could be redesigned to be RESTy interfaces.
Also, a lot of the RESTy examples are rather simplistic; what happens when my web ‘application’ grows to supporting 20-30 services and data types; what sorts of tools / frameworks / libraries might we expect we’ll need to both implement the app, and act as a client to the app.
Well the REST debate is over and won. But the Semantic Web debate, which is just the other side of the REST coin, needs some good evangelism. You won’t find the space overcrowded here. It is also great fun to be able to do battle with such powerful tools…
Mark, I though about the ‘whats next’ question for four months, and lo and behold, Amazon throws a wild pitch, just to see if we’re watching !
http://www.dehora.net/journal/2007/12/16/amazon-simpledb-non-rest-api/
So, while the REST debate may be over and won, the reality is that even major players can get it wrong.
So, what next ? Well, how about taking REST data services to the next level, where we could start to leverage the benefits of uniform interfaces, as opposed to just extolling the benefits ?