Web Things, by Mark Baker

I’ve spent some time over the past couple of months helping Microsoft with RESTful issues for two (soon to be three, I hope) different groups there. One of those is the WCF team, and Omri has just reported on some of it. I’m not sure how much of my input (if any) made it into that release, or if it’s all set for the next release, but there you have it; WCF does REST.

It was quite enjoyable to sit around the table (conference room and sushi table alike!) with Don and Steve in the context of trying to answer the question “How can Microsoft best support RESTful service developers?”, and not have to dwell much on the SOA/WS-vs-REST thing. Lots of love all round. 8-)

I’ll point to the other projects as soon as I know they’ve gone public.

Update; if it wasn’t clear, this was a consulting arrangement through my company, Coactus.

Update 2; the second project has been announced. Here’s more; doesn’t that XML just scream “Yaron”? 8-)

It’s good to see Edwin agreeing with Steve Vinoski about how distributed systems are not as simple as just exposing object APIs through SOAP.

I especially like this bit; “We should think of it as email for business applications”. Yes! But email is fairly limited; we can do better than just “add this message to that mailbox”. What if we extended email with the ability to retrieve messages, replace existing messages, plus other operations on messages and mailboxes? If you squint a little, that’s what the Web is.