--- Mike Glendinning <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> If you're a developer, I hope you can see that it is never that
> obvious what your "resources" should be (for REST) or what operations
> you need to perform on them. Whether you need to concentrate on the
> nouns or the verbs will not always be clear. And what is "right" for
> one application may be entirely wrong for another.
REST does not make Business Architecture obsolete. A lot of the
"strategic SOA" thinking out there is applicable to REST --
understanding the granularity of a service is similar to understanding
the granularity of a resource.
The RESTful folks do have a good antidote to the headiness of this
challenge though: it's an information architecture problem (i.e.
findability, connectedness, semantics, etc.), similar to what good,
usable websites have had to go through. One solves the problem by
focusing on classes of consumers, their usability and needs -- except
this time, instead of just HTML, one takes machine actors into account
in your data formats. Which (so far) leads to Atom, XHTML
Microformats, and custom JSON or XML formats. Eventually, it may lead
to more semantically interoperable efforts such as RDF, OWL, etc.
> In the past few years, I sense that conceptual modelling has become
> rather unfashionable. I find that developers tend to just throw
> together a few Java classes (without much thought) and then assume
> some magical O/R tool will create an appropriate database for them.
I think there's quite a bit of thought put into object models, though
it depends on the team. It's very risky to design a parallel object
model & data model, and hope the O/R tool will bridge the gap (you need
a lot of experience with the O/R tool).
I do think there are some dangerous paths being taken, of course,
whether it's REST or SOA. The thought that XML is a "data model" on
par with the relational model is rather laughable. XML is about
interchange, it says nothing about data management. Yet I do see some
misunderstandings and desires to redo enterprise modeling efforts, this
time with XML Schema. (shudder)
The SemWeb's OWL & RDF seem to be much more relational, but haven't
caught on yet, and also don't say much about data management -- perhaps
since data management requires (at least temporarily) a "closed world"
assumption vs. the semantic web's "open world". This probably will be
solved eventually.
> If the current debate on SOA/REST raises an awareness of the
> importance (and difficulties!) of conceptual modelling and improves
> the general level of such skills in the industry, then that at least
> would be a "good thing" in my view.
I hope so -- I'm spending my summer working on a conceptual modeling
method & metamodel for service architectures (including RESTful ones)
for BEA... would be sad if it never gets used :-)
Cheers
Stu
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