REST and SOAP

Weblog:		Are Web Services receding?
Subject:		REST and SOAP
Date:		2004-09-23 09:47:46
From:		glebleu

First, a couple comments on this post, without going in too many details: - To me, SOAP is really just a way for existing centralized platform vendors to maintain their existing concepts in place, as well as their market share: the avalanche of WS spec looks to me like a way to make competition impossible, except between IBM and MSFT, on the platform market. - Standards are great, but most of the time, they get crazy by trying to put everybody's need into one document, bringing extremly complex abstractions along the way, or tons of optional fields to avoid semantic collision, that 99% of people don't need. This is true for tech and industry standards. In a way 90% of us need ultra-simple standards, and 10% have very complex needs that are too expensive to standardize. - Simplicity drives adoption. - Adoption drives change. From this last perspective, REST is great. It is based on existing web concepts: URLs, etc. But, at the same time, since I haven't really got into the details of REST, I have a few questions about it. To me REST is very library oriented, if you see what I meean, very publishing oriented, or database-centric. How does REST would handle distributed transactions, does it have to? how does REST handle event-driven, asynchronous (notification) integration ? does it have to? can we live without all this? Is there a good book/starting point on how REST can be put to work in an enterprise environment? Thanks Guillaume Lebleu Brixlogic