On 14/06/07, Mark Baker <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > > > > > > On 6/14/07, Steve Jones <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > > But FWIW, IME, RESTful systems generally "look like and operate like" > > > the business. That's not (or at least shouldn't be) a goal though, > > > just an interesting side effect. > > > > Ummm could you show me one? So far the ones I've seen look like a set > > of URIs and XML documents. Something concrete like warehouse stock > > management or risk analysis would be good examples to have. > > Have you used salesforce.com? You get URIs for important CRM > resources like accounts, leads, contacts, etc.. And if you're looking > at, say, a contact, it would include a link to the account that the > contact is associated with, etc... I would definitely call having a > name for those kinds of important resources "looking like" the > business.
Judging by below I assume you are talking about the Website side of it, and it is indeed superb, but that is the "skin" presented to the business rather than the actual operation (e.g. if you book from expedia or british airways they also give you ways to access the system to do what you want). What I was talking about what the architecture of Salesforce.com itself (which might be SOA using business services, I don't know). Historically IT has been good at presenting the skin, and crap at delivering what lies beneath. > > The "operates like" bit is less clear with salesforce.com AFAICT: I > haven't seen any workflow-like functionality, but I've yet to run > across a workflow that couldn't be represented with hypermedia & form > submission. N.B. I am not saying that REST can't be used to deliver against a business SOA (Stefan for one assures me that it can, and I think he is right) I am saying that REST is about the implementation and technology and not about the conceptual business architecture. To have an IT estate that looks like and operates like the business you need to do things like change organisational structures, change the CR processes, change the financial processes and generally change the way people think, the technology is a part (an important part) of that but it is not the only bit. So to be clear REST _can_ be used to deliver what I think of as "business SOA", but SOA at this level is more holistic than simply technology. > > I haven't looked at the salesforce "APIs", but I would hope that they > also use URIs to provide the machine processable representations of > those important resources (hopefully using the same URIs above, but I > doubt they've done that). > > Mark. >
