On Nov 24, 2006, at 7:47 PM, Paul Fremantle wrote:
StefanMy favourite internet Irish tin whistle music website uses SOAP to link to Google, and Yahoo uses SOAP to power its email client, so I don't think you can say SOAP on the internet is dead. I give the music website as an example of a small organisation that isn't "enterprise".
Well, maybe dead is relative -- but I don't think SOAP/WSDL would be the obvious first choice for anyone doing a "Web API" nowadays.
Anyway, that wasn't my main point! It is perhaps a little bit wrong to talk about REST as an option for a Service Oriented Architecture. Most existing services don't cleanly map into REST, except those directly backed by a resource model such as a database. Even a layer of stored procedures over the data is likely to mean that you cannot map it into REST.Really you should be talking about Resource Oriented Architecture (ROA).
I agree, provided we're talking about SOA, the technology/ architecture, not SOA, the business concept (as used e.g. by Steve Jones).
I actually think ROA has a number of attractive aspects, but I don't think its the solution to everything. I think that a POX (Plain Ole XML) or SOAP approach is going to be required because not everyone thinks in a resource oriented way.
POX doesn't have a real definition, at least none that I know of. For the sake of the argument, let's assume that POX can be just as non- RESTful as SOAP 1.1 and as RESTful as the Atom Publishing Protocol (which, after all, uses only plain old XML). IMO, the more RESTful, the better, but I'm not zealous here. Obviously anything that works is fine. Which is beside the point, I think.
I think its time to call the Rest-ians on their distinctions. There are plenty of RESTians taking a hard line on what is "REST" and what isn't,
That's actually one of its benefits, IMO - it's pretty easy to assess the "RESTfulness" of something. It's pretty hard to do that for "service-orientation" :-)
and at the same time willing to say that REST is the only good solution for an SOA. Well, if you analyze most "services" and SOA they aren't based on state transitions of resources. Trying to have your cake and eat it?
I don't get that point. Many existing SOAs use Web services and are modeled in a way that could have been achieved with CORBA (and, as Eric is sure to point out, some have even been built on CORBA). So what? REST proponents suggest that there's a better way, and that it's different.
I agree that using your terminology, I'm advocating ROA instead of SOA. Using Steve's terminology, I prefer REST as an implementation architecture for (business) SOA as opposed to WS-*.
Stefan
Paul On 11/24/06, Stefan Tilkov <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:I agree with the notion that business is more important than IT, and many, many IT folks should work to learn a lot more about the actual business value and their part (or lack of) in it. Whether or not REST vs. WS-* or Java vs. Ruby or C++ vs. Smalltalk or Windows vs. Linux vs. OS X is relevant or not depends very much on the topic of the discussion we're having. When we're talking about business strategies for a telecommunications company, Java vs. Ruby doesn't play a big role. That doesn't mean that they're the same — even if they're both "just programming languages". Similarly, I refuse to agree with the assertion that when I look at the technical, architectural properties of a system landscape, it doesn't matter whether its architecture is built around DCOM/MTS, J2EE, WS-* or REST. But that's all beside Steve's original point, which IIRC was "even if it's cool, it doesn't matter because the vendors don't do it". I disagree: Witness the inclusion of (admittedly bad) REST support in Indigo/WCF and Axis2, or the Systinet 2 repository's REST interface, or the fact that Google's Nelson Minar now asserts he'd never choose SOAP and WSDL over REST again … on the Internet, it seems to me that SOAP/WSDL has clearly lost, and this does not bode well for its future in the enterprise. I will continue to help build good WS-based architectures — I'm not as principled as Mark Baker :-) Whenever I can get someone to listen, I will try to convince them of the REST alternative, though, and I expect this to get easier over the course of the next few years. Stefan -- Stefan Tilkov, http://www.innoq.com/blog/st/ On Nov 24, 2006, at 4:55 PM, Anil John wrote:<SteveJones> The problem isn't the technical standards IMO, its the modelling of the business and what a service should _be_ that is the biggest challenge to successful SOA adoption and implementation. </SteveJones> +1 I would add, if Steve does not already have it as part of his interpretation of modeling the business, that semantic understanding and agreement on the information that the business is working with, as well the cultural/organizational aspects are also a critical challenges to SOA adoption and implemenation. Regards, - Anil :- :- Anil John :- http://www.aniltj.com/blog :--- Paul Fremantle VP/Technology, WSO2 and OASIS WS-RX TC Co-chair http://bloglines.com/blog/paulfremantle [EMAIL PROTECTED] "Oxygenating the Web Service Platform", www.wso2.com Yahoo! Groups Links [EMAIL PROTECTED]
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