Web Things, by Mark Baker

Jim Webber’s flattered that I included he and Savas in my list of highlights. No problem, you guys earned it. AFAIK, you two were the first self-described Web services proponents to be able to put the CORBA-like legacy completely behind you and go for a pure document exchange model; none of this hybrid document/RPC crappola.

He adds;

Now if only I could convince him to decouple the Web from Web Services. There’s a whole Internet to embrace outside of HTTP :-P

Heh, very true, there is a lot more to the Internet and Web than just HTTP. But, not so much more that most (not all) of it can’t reasonably be used via an HTTP proxy, or in an HTTP-like manner. Just think about how many other systems have been Web-ified; email addresses use mailto:, FTP, though not used nearly as much since the Web came along, is hardly ever used without an ftp: URI.

(Jim and I are having an exchange off-line which suggests he was thinking in this direction; kudos!)

So I was thinking last night about how far – or not – we’d come in the whole “Web vs. Web services” debates. In one respect we’ve come a long way; you hardly ever hear the argument that “the Web requires humans!”. Many (but still not all) people remain indifferent about that; that the Web may or may not be usable for this, but it’s moot anyhow, because the “World isn’t going that way”. But that’s still pretty good, as it shifts the discussion into the more concrete and less subjective realm of software architecture, allowing us to use reasonably well understood means of evaluating and comparing architectures for suitability to a particular problem domain.

But on the other hand, the Web still doesn’t get the respect it deserves from a lot of folk as a serious distributed computing platform. I’ve just been reviewing some papers for Middleware 2004, and some of them talk about a variety of distributed computing platforms, yet all fail to mention the Web as a peer.

There’s been a lot of low points, obviously, over the past four or five years, but a few highlights too. Some of the latter include;

• the XML Protocol WG agreeing – after much lobbying from Henrik and myself – to use HTTP error codes for the transfer of SOAP faults
• the TAG finding on When To Use GET, though I haven’t seen a Web service that uses it that way yet
• Roy Fielding‘s defense of the uniform interface
• Atom rejecting calls to define a SOAP API and instead going with a RESTful design
• Amazon saying that 85% of their “Web services” traffic is via the RESTful interface
• Jim Webber and Savas Parastatidis supporting a uniform document submission semantic, dubbed processThis

Now, with Tim Bray joining the ranks of the WS-Disenfranchised (albeit for slightly different reasons than myself), the future’s looking even brighter. Onward!

Ick, the JSF “form” tag only supports HTTP POST, not GET. Repeat after me, “URIs and GET are goodness”. It’s easy to work around (write your own HTML or a new tag), but still …
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Dumb, dumb, dumb. Atom is cool, but it’s not backwards compatible with RSS (though an RDF version would be, nudge nudge).
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+1
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State transfer on top of SOAP on top of state transfer (HTTP). Sigh.
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“So, let’s consider a contract as a resource, a resource that’s shared by multiple parties.”. Bingo. Carlos chooses wisely 8-)
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“One should be as cautious of fanaticism as they are wary of a vendor’s intentions”. Ouch! True, but ouch.
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Eric writes sums up the XML Europe 2004 conference, and his summary includes a couple of points that REST and Web services folks might be interested in.

While talking about Amazon, he writes;

These services are available either as SOAP or REST (that is, XML over HTTP). Much simpler, REST web services can be tested using a web browser. They account for 80% of the actual requests. In my view this is confirmation of the continuity between the Web and web services. Before anything else, web services are, as their name indicates, services accessible on the Web. They belong to the Web, and that’s what makes them so interesting.

Yup. A little bit of wishful thinking perhaps, but that’s fine.

Then he mentions a talk by the occasionally-reclusive (8-) Paul Prescod;

As expected from a defender of the REST architectural style, Prescod’s presentation started with a moving speech in favor of REST: “the document is what matters”; “we need resource oriented architecture rather than SOA”; “XML is the solution to the problem, not the problem”; “the emphasis should be on resources” and “there should be a seamless web of information resources”.

“the document is what matters”, I like that. But I expect that SOA proponents would be dumbfounded by that statement, since they’ve been saying pretty much the same thing, at least since “document style” SOAP came into common use. But the difference between document-SOA and REST is that the former uses documents and APIs, while the latter just uses documents. In other words, document style SOA is like a hybrid style of RPC and document orientation, whereas REST is purely document oriented; simple document exchange (aka state transfer) between distributed and autonomous parties.

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