Needless to say, I’m a fan.

I’ve had enough. I’m not participating in any more “REST vs. SOAP” discussions. When I started on this mission to educate those who didn’t understand how the Web could help them, I figured it would be pretty straightforward; I’d explain it, they’d understand, and then we’d all skip away hand-in-hand whistling show tunes. Of course, it didn’t quite work out that way. Instead, I ended up spending on the order of $100K of my own money on travel, as well as the opportunity cost of many hundreds of otherwise billable hours, for what is working out to be essentially nothing in return. If that weren’t enough, my health has suffered the past year or so, in ways I won’t get into here, but that I’m confident are in part attributable to the despair I’ve felt over this extended period of frustration.

The war really has been won, I realize that now. And I’m happy to pat myself on my back for a job well done, despite what it’s cost me. Would I do it over again? No bloody way. I should have just “pulled a Roy” and continued to work with and improve the Web, but restrict my Web services standards work to trying to minimize the harm Web services were doing to the Web (which I was doing, but I went way beyond that). I think Max Planck got it right when he said;

A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.

Oh, and one last thing. I told you so. There, that felt good.

First up, the belief that the Web has nothing to say about reliability, transactions, etc… Mark writes;

Yes, we have interoperability on the WWW (ignoring the differences in HTML syntax and browsers). But we do not have interoperabilty for transactions, reliable messaging, workflow etc. That’s not to say we can’t do it: as I said before, we did manage to do REST+transactions in HP but it was in a small-scale deployment involving only a couple of partners. There is no technical impediment to doing this: it’s entirely political. It can be done, I just don’t see it ever being done. Until it happens, REST/HTTP cannot compete with the kinds of heterogeneous out-of-the-box interoperability that we have demonstrated with WS-*

I’ve talked about this a lot, most recently in my position paper to the W3C Workshop on Enterprise Services. The gist of the argument is that the Web address all of those needs, just in a way which you might not recognize because it has to address them within the confines of architectural constraints that Web services folks aren’t used to. Again, that’s not to say that every possible one of your needs can be met out of the box today, only that far more of them can than you might believe.

Mark also uses the very common argument that because interoperability requires agreement on data for both Web and Web services, that there’s no significant difference between them (I hope that summarizes his point);

So just because I decide to use REST and HTTP doesn’t mean I get instant portability and interoperability. Yes, I get interoperability at the low level, but it says nothing about interoperability at the payload.

I can’t quickly find any past blog entries that touch on this point (though I know they’re there), but this argument I find the most confusing. I suspect it has to do with what I perceive to be a disconnect between Internet and intranet protocol stacks, but I can’t say for sure.

What Mark calls the “low level” isn’t the low level at all. Assuming he means HTTP, the agreement you get by using it is more (higher level) agreement than you get if you were just using SOAP (or XML-RPC or IIOP or BEEP or …). That’s because you’re agreeing on the methods in addition to an envelope (not to mention many other features).

Where I do disagree though is whether this is a good or a bad thing to have these camps. Now I’m clearly biased as I’m on the contract side [...]

Hold it! Let’s make sure we’re having the right conversation here. It’s not “pro contract” vs. “anti contract”, it’s simply “many contracts” vs “one contract”.

Resume!

I’ve long thought that what was needed in this discussion was new perspectives on the relationship between REST and WS/RPC/etc… that would permit the message to reach more people. Tim’s ably doing his part along those lines with his followup posts. I would never have thought to describe things this way.

So, who’s next?

I didn’t realize it until now, but James Snell gets the dubious honour of being the target of that post. It’s like he’s Steve Trachsel to my Mark Mcgwire 8-).

That is all.