Web Things, by Mark Baker

It’s about time.

Web services were under attack (principled, of course) at today’s TAG call. Better late than never, I suppose…

Roy: The situation I run into is that if they don't solve the problem,
we shouldn't recommend a technology. ... WSaddressing may not be useful.

[…]

<Roy> what I said was that the WSA folks are roughly the same as the WSDL
folks and the WS* folks in general, and we have regularly described problems
with WS that need to be resolved in order to fit in with the Web, and they have
regularly refused to do so in a meaningful way. At some point, we have to say
that this technology should not be recommended to W3C members.

(emphasis mine)

[…]

<Roy> I don't find any technology that doesn't use the Web to be a useful product of the W3C.

[…]

<noah> Though, to be fair, the work required to process such a header would be a
structural change to most deployed SOAP software.
<DanC> so... the folks who made up that software dug that hole. they can dig
themselves out, no?

It’s a real shame. This would all just go away if only Web services advocates realized that the Web provides what they need for distributed, document oriented computing. You wonder why Dan, Tim, and Roy (and maybe Henry – I don’t know him very well) are pushing as they are? It’s because they understand that the Web is necessary, and that after you slash away all that makes the Web the Web, what’s left isn’t anything of any particular value to anyone, protestations to the contrary notwithstanding.

I’m not holding my breath that anything other than a toothless compromise will result from this exchange, but still, it’s nice to see the pushback; misery loves company, as they say 8-)

Another satisfied customer (hey, if Winer can point to every RSS 2.0 feed, surely I can do this? 8-)
(link) [del.icio.us/distobj]

Yeah!
(link) [del.icio.us/distobj]

Another convert, thanks to John Cowan’s Extreme presentation
(link) [del.icio.us/distobj]

Ben Carlyle wonders;

I’ve been very serouslying[sic] considering dropping the only new http verb I’ve introduced for HttpSubscription: SUBSCRIBE. […] I’m coming around to the idea of saying this is simply a GET.

Very wise, young Padawan. As Roy says;

In the REST style, consuming components usually pull representations. Although this is less efficient when viewed as a single client wishing to monitor a single resource, the scale of the Web makes an unregulated push model infeasible.

Some comments on an interesting paper, but unfortunately yet another one that misunderstands REST.
(link) [del.icio.us/distobj]

Still catching up …

So I guess there was a minor hulabaloo over Dare’s piece on his preference for SOAP over REST. From what I can tell though, all he’s saying is that SOA/SOAP is a better fit for his mental model of how distributed systems work. That’s fine. It was mine too, long ago, when I used to hack CORBA ORBs. Then I realized that the Web was a superior platform for large scale integration with documents, which forced me to change my mental model, since obviously one should endeavour to have their mental model match the superior style (at least if one cares about their careers 8-). As Dare concludes;

My point from yesterday was that as far as approaches go, I prefer to think of building distributed applications from a service oriented perspective than from a REST perspective. This is completely different from endorsing SOAP over using POX/HTTP as the technology for building distributed applications. That is a discussion for another day.

Looking forward to it, Dare.

From what I’ve heard of Amazon’s recent Web services efforts behind the scenes, they should pay more attention to this guy.
(link) [del.icio.us/distobj]

I thought I’d read everything Dan Connolly had ever written about the Web, but this gem (found via via del.icio.us) apparently evaded my radar. He’d written other notes on Web & OO, but those weren’t as easy to digest as this one. Here’s the first paragraph;

I must take this opportunity to dispell a myth that is all to pervasive in the scientific and product literature surrounding the Web: that distributed objects are something that can be, or some day will be, added to the Web. Distributed objects are the very heart of the Web, and have been since its invention.

Right back at ya, Dan.

“call.setDoREST(true);”. Heh. 8-)
(link) [del.icio.us/distobj]