{"id":771,"date":"2005-04-14T15:14:00","date_gmt":"2005-04-14T19:14:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.markbaker.ca\/wp\/2005\/04\/14\/accidentally-restful\/"},"modified":"2005-04-14T15:14:00","modified_gmt":"2005-04-14T19:14:00","slug":"accidentally-restful","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.markbaker.ca\/blog\/2005\/04\/accidentally-restful\/","title":{"rendered":"Accidentally RESTful"},"content":{"rendered":"

I’ve talked about both the\npluses and minuses<\/a>\nof\nAmazon<\/a>‘s\napproach to Web Services<\/a>\nfor some time now. Recently, I’ve heard that they’re in the process of\ngreatly expanding those services, which is great. But I think that before\nthey go too far with that, they should really dig a little deeper to learn\nwhy it is exactly that their “RESTful” data retrieval services are getting the\nuptake<\/a>\nthey are.<\/p>\n\n

I don’t think it’s controversial to claim that Amazon see the REST vs Web\nservices debate as primarily about\nencodings<\/a>;\neither a message is encoded as a SOAP envelope, or it’s encoded as a URI, but in\nboth cases the abstract message – the information being conveyed – is identical.\nI completely disagree, of course, and believe that there’s a very large\narchitectural difference between those two approaches; that in http URI form,\nthe URI isn’t the message, and instead, the surrounding HTTP message which\nencapsulates that URI becomes the real message, while the URI itself is treated\nas an opaque bag-o-bits. Through this encapsulation, GET becomes the operation.<\/p>\n\n

What I just described I refer to as “accidentally RESTful”, and it’s\nsur<\/a>–\nprisingly<\/a>\ncommon<\/a>.\nAnd while, for the simple data retrieval case, it is<\/em> RESTful,\nand a significant improvement over vanilla SOA, you’ll find that as you\nadd support for state-changing actions and just generally evolve that\napplication over time, you’re going to run into many of the same problems\nyou’d run into doing SOA.<\/p>\n\n

Fair warning!<\/p>\n\n

Update<\/em>; oh, I suppose this is, in part, a response to\nsomething Dare said<\/a>\na couple of weeks back; those APIs he lists\nARE<\/em> RESTful, at least with respect to using the uniform interface.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"I’ve talked about both the pluses and minuses of Amazon‘s approach to Web Services for some time now. Recently, I’ve heard that they’re in the process of greatly expanding those services, which is great. But I think that before they go too far with that, they should really dig a little deeper to learn why […]","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],"class_list":["post-771","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-rest","tag-soap"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.markbaker.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/771","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=771"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.markbaker.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/771\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.markbaker.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=771"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.markbaker.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=771"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.markbaker.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=771"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}