On Fri, 2006-11-24 at 23:45 +0100, Stefan Tilkov wrote: > On Nov 24, 2006, at 7:47 PM, Paul Fremantle wrote: > > > Stefan > > > > My 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.
Well it shouldn't be .. if you don't need SOAP you don't need it. If all you need is to send some XML over HTTP or HTTPS then SOAP is not at all needed. SOAP should come into the picture IFF you need message level security, reliability or transactions or any of the other things that have been built on SOAP. If not why pay the price? WSDL? You either need WSDL (2.0, not 1.1 as the new version has much better POX/HTTP support) or something like it. How else do you tell other (computers) what your RESTful service does? Why do you think people are creating things like WADL (which is basically a cut down version of WSDL targeting only POX/HTTP cases; I feel bad for anyone who also wants to expose an XMPP way to talk talk to the service). > > 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). +1. > > 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" :-) OK if its easy then let's see the criteria. RESTafarians say cookies are not RESTful etc.. How do you see a GET http://foo.com/xyz?a=b&y=10 and say whether its RESTful or not? > 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-*. Wait, how do you advocate REST as an implementation technology for *service* oriented architecture when REST doesn't have the concept of services but rather has the concept of resources? Sanjiva. -- Sanjiva Weerawarana, Ph.D. Founder & Director; Lanka Software Foundation; http://www.opensource.lk/ Founder, Chairman & CEO; WSO2, Inc.; http://www.wso2.com/ Director; Open Source Initiative; http://www.opensource.org/ Member; Apache Software Foundation; http://www.apache.org/ Visiting Lecturer; University of Moratuwa; http://www.cse.mrt.ac.lk/
