--- Steve Jones <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> I love the implication that business aligned is a > bad thing. It's not, normally ;-) And you certainly could create business-aligned WSDL operations that are shared within a supply network or an industry, if you had the will and influence and political savvy. But broadly speaking, human organizations disagree on terms, definitions, and the relative "importance" of one operation over a nother. And disagreement hurts interoperability. Here's another take on it... If you want to interoperate the classic "RPC" way, you build your operations, and then describe your interface, and someone bends their worldview into your worldview when they invoke you. EAI made this more economical, and the latest web services tools (WSDL) make this even more economical, but it's still a matter of percentage points of productivity In the "SOA" way, your producers and consumers get together, bang out a shared contract, and govern / evolve that contract over time. That includes data formats and shared operations. Costs start to drop much more significantly, as you reduce the number of potential transformations. In the "REST" way, it's like SOA, but more constrained -- we align the contract on the most general operations possible -- In HTTP's case, GET/POST/PUT/DELETE. If "everyone" can just agree on one small thing, such side effects, or idempotence, we've generated a universally interoperable operation, one with tremendous value. Or, as Roy Fielding put it a few years ago, "The Web creates more business value, every day, than has been generated by every single example of an RPC-like interface in the entire history of computers." > But to the point, there is no business value in PUT, > its the actual EXECUTION that gives the value. Actually, and this may come across as bizarre, but most of the value is not in the execution. It's in how these things are arranged in a system configuration that provides the greatest value. The whole idea of large scale organization, going back to Adam Smith in economics, Peter Drucker in management, etc. is that the "system" is what's productive, not the execution of any individual task. This is the argument for a market-based organization of an economy vs. a planned economy. This was also the insight of the Ford system, and is also the insight of the Toyota production system, or "lean" approaches. While you may be able to derive value out of the execution of a task at a certain granularity, the real value to be gleaned from how it is arranged into an integrated system. And the whole REST argument is that there are some styles of systems organization that have more powerful & desirable properties for large-scale decentralized computing than others do. > We become obsessed with technology and > completely lose track of > the business value and objectives. I completely agree with this. But I also think that REST v. WSDL is just a symptom of a broader issue, one that has major business implications, and won't be solved soon... ;-) Cheers Stu __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around http://mail.yahoo.com ------------------------ Yahoo! Groups Sponsor --------------------~--> Yahoo! Groups gets a make over. See the new email design. http://us.click.yahoo.com/XISQkA/lOaOAA/yQLSAA/NhFolB/TM --------------------------------------------------------------------~-> Yahoo! Groups Links <*> To visit your group on the web, go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/service-orientated-architecture/ <*> To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] <*> Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to: http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
