{"id":401,"date":"2004-06-15T00:57:00","date_gmt":"2004-06-15T04:57:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.markbaker.ca\/wp\/?p=398"},"modified":"2004-06-15T00:57:00","modified_gmt":"2004-06-15T04:57:00","slug":"rest-workflow-paper","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.markbaker.ca\/blog\/2004\/06\/rest-workflow-paper\/","title":{"rendered":"REST Workflow paper"},"content":{"rendered":"

Stefan found<\/a>\na paper with a very interesting title, that I hadn’t heard\nanything about;\nDeveloping Web Services Choreography Standards – The Case of REST vs. SOAP<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n

I’d heard Keith Swenson’s name a few days earlier in the context of\nASAP<\/a>\nand some of the recent\nbuzz<\/a>\nsurrounding it, but I’ve known about his work for a while. I spent some\ntime studying both SWAP<\/a>\n(co-authored with a buddy of mine,\nGreg Bolcer<\/a>)\nand\nIPP<\/a>\nduring their development.<\/p>\n\n

Aside;<\/em> IPP actually slowed my studies into the Web (along with\nHTTP-NG<\/a>, sigh) because I, for\nwhatever reason, started by assuming that IPP was a good<\/em> use of HTTP.\nOnly later did I realize that the exact opposite was true (as was only recently\nconfirmed<\/a> by Roy).<\/p>\n\n

On the upside, IPP’s use of POST spawned an important and interesting exchange,\nvia Internet draft, that I studied very carefully (which lead to a\ndraft of my own<\/a>);\nDon’t go Postal<\/a><\/li>,\nand\nThe Use of POST<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n

Anyhow, all of this to say that I was<\/em> quite surprised to see\nREST reasonably well represented … except for perhaps this part;<\/p>\n\n

\nSeveral standards for REST style workflow interaction have been proposed, namely SWAP, Wf-XML\n[26, 52, 58], AWSP [49] and ASAP [38]. Instead of relying on the HTTP 1.0 commands, these standards\nprovide higher level operations that are specifically designed for the interaction with remote processes.\n<\/blockquote>\n\n

Hint; if you’re trying to provide operations at a higher level than the\napplication layer (e.g. HTTP), you’re abusing HTTP, not using it. But, the\noperations being tunneled are themselves reasonably generic, which is good\ndesign practice for this space, and what I think the authors were trying to\npoint out as nearly RESTful.<\/p>\n\n

It’s really encouraging to see REST mentioned in the context of workflow,\nsince I believe it provides a superior base for scalable solutions than does\nSOA. I think this paper could be an important piece of work if the authors were\nto spend some time studying both architectural styles from a software architecture\nPOV, as well as actually building some systems with each. As is, the analysis is\npretty decent, but the conclusion – basically that it’s a crap shoot over which\none is superior – needs some major work.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Stefan found a paper with a very interesting title, that I hadn’t heard anything about; Developing Web Services Choreography Standards – The Case of REST vs. SOAP. I’d heard Keith Swenson’s name a few days earlier in the context of ASAP and some of the recent buzz surrounding it, but I’ve known about his work […]","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[26,40],"class_list":["post-401","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-soap","tag-xml"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.markbaker.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/401","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=401"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.markbaker.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/401\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.markbaker.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=401"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.markbaker.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=401"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.markbaker.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=401"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}