> Seriously though this is the point I was making. There is nothing > magic about REST that gives you reliability and resilience, it gives > some hints but it still remains a job to be done to deliver on those > expectations, saying that doing REST will mean that service > automatically exhibit those properties isn't overly helpful and will > lead to people becoming disillusioned with REST when their service fails. Nothing is magic. Anything can be done poorly. So, yes, it's ultimately up to the developer--as everything is. But if your application _does_ obey REST principles (which is what is implied by "doing REST"), then, yes, it surely does exhibit the properties stated earlier. If you obey the statelessness constraint, for instance, then your application is more reliable because it can be instantiated redundantly without the brittleness of sharing session information across servers, and thus become more resistant to partial failure. If your application obeys the cacheability constraint, then, by definition, your application is more performant. It goes on like that.
In contrast, since WS-* is without constraint, it can't be said to exhibit any desirable property--whether done well or poorly. - Pete
