{"id":1324,"date":"2006-03-14T11:58:00","date_gmt":"2006-03-14T15:58:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.markbaker.ca\/wp\/2006\/03\/14\/amazon-s3-soa-vs-rest-at-a-crossroads\/"},"modified":"2006-03-14T11:58:00","modified_gmt":"2006-03-14T15:58:00","slug":"amazon-s3-soa-vs-rest-at-a-crossroads","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.markbaker.ca\/blog\/2006\/03\/amazon-s3-soa-vs-rest-at-a-crossroads\/","title":{"rendered":"Amazon S3; SOA vs REST at a crossroads"},"content":{"rendered":"

Amazon has just announced a\nstorage service<\/a>\nwhich seems somewhat similar to\nGoogle Base<\/a> (erm, apparently\nwe can\nexpect<\/a>\n“Google Drive” shortly too).\nfrom a technology POV, though the business model – charging directly\nfor storage and bandwidth consumption – is quite different.<\/p>\n\n

What’s most interest here I think, is that it presents both a HTTP\nand SOAP (RPC) based interface. But more than that, the HTTP interface is\nquite rich<\/a>.\nFor one, they haven’t made the\ncommon mistake<\/a>\nof putting operation names in URIs. For another, they’re making use\nof “advanced” HTTP features like caching. In fact, it appears as though the RESTful\ninterface was developed first. How can I tell? Because many of the HTTP\nheaders they used were simply replicated in their SOAP\/XML messages. Yes, really.\nSee for yourselves.<\/p>\n\n

The HTTP GET response;<\/p>\n\n

\nHTTP\/1.1 200 OK\nx-amz-id-2: j5ULAWpFbJQJpukUsZ4tfXVOjVZExLtEyNTvY5feC+hHIegsN5p578JLTVpkFrpL\nx-amz-request-id: BE39A20848A0D52B\nDate: Thu, 17 Nov 2005 08:22:38 GMT\nx-amz-meta-family: Muntz\nLast-Modified: Thu, 17 Nov 2005 08:22:38 GMT\nETag: \"828ef3fdfa96f00ad9f27c383fc9ac7f\"\nContent-Type: text\/plain\nContent-Length: 5\nConnection: close\nServer: AmazonS3\n\nHA-HA\n<\/pre>\n\n
And the (I assume) semantically equivalent SOAP response;<\/p>\n\n
\n<GetObjectResponse xmlns=\"http:\/\/s3.amazonaws.com\/doc\/2006-03-01\/\">\n  <GetObjectResponse>\n    <Status>\n      <Code>200<\/Code>\n      <Description>OK<\/Description>\n    <\/Status>\n    <Metadata>\n      <Name>Content-Type<\/Name>\n      <Value>text\/plain<\/Value>\n    <\/Metadata>\n    <Metadata>\n      <Name>family<\/Name>\n      <Value>Muntz<\/Value>\n    <\/Metadata>\n    <Data>aGEtaGE=<\/Data>\n    <LastModified>2005-11-18T01:25:07.994Z<\/LastModified>\n    <ETag>&quot;828ef3fdfa96f00ad9f27c383fc9ac7f&quot;<\/ETag>\n  <\/GetObjectResponse>\n<\/GetObjectResponse>\n<\/pre>\n\n
Ouch!  I honestly don’t know where to start.<\/p>\n\n
But what was wrong with simply supporting RESTful SOAP, and returning the\ndata wrapped in a SOAP envelope, adorned with (essentially) the same HTTP metadata\nas in the pure HTTP example above?  It would be returned if the HTTP request included a\n“Accept: application\/soap+xml” header.  That way you get to save face by telling\nfolks you support SOAP, while also getting all the benefits of reusing the Web.\n*shrug*<\/p>\n\n
I find it hard to believe that the bright folks at Amazon did this because\nthey felt it was useful.  I imagine there must have been a mandate that came down\nfrom up high dictating “All services must expose SOAP and REST interfaces”.\nBecause that SOAP interface is comical.  Nevermind\n85%\/15%<\/a>,\nI’d be surprised if anybody<\/em> used it.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Amazon has just announced a storage service which seems somewhat similar to Google Base (erm, apparently we can expect “Google Drive” shortly too). from a technology POV, though the business model – charging directly for storage and bandwidth consumption – is quite different. What’s most interest here I think, is that it presents both a […]","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[22,26,40],"class_list":["post-1324","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-rest","tag-soap","tag-xml"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.markbaker.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1324","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.markbaker.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.markbaker.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.markbaker.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.markbaker.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1324"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.markbaker.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1324\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.markbaker.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1324"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.markbaker.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1324"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.markbaker.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1324"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}