On Tue, Apr 22, 2008 at 7:26 AM, Anne Thomas Manes <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > FYI: Gartner's definition of WOA is here: > http://blog.gartner.com/blog/index.php?catid=31&blogid=9 > > All respect to Nick Gall, but I really don't think the industry needs > another "OA" acronym. REST is a more appropriate term to describe the > architectural style. (Except that so many people interpret REST as > technology rather than an architectural style).
Here's an old post that explains my thinking behind why I thought REST wasn't enough<http://ironick.typepad.com/ironick/2006/08/sam_ruby_thinks.html> : I coined WOA <http://blog.gartner.com/blog/index.php?itemid=400> (for better or worse--since I loath coining unnecessary acronyms) as part of my research agenda. ... I thought long and hard about coining WOA rather than just adopting REST or "Web Architecture" (as in the Architecture of the World Wide Web Volume One <http://www.furl.net/item.jsp?id=1272865>). I felt REST was too caught up in religious debates, and Web Architecture would confuse people, since it was originally oriented toward user-to-system interaction, not system-to-system interaction. Besides the religious war problem (which seems to be waning now that REST has won <grin>), I'd add that while Roy's REST PhD thesis implies a lot of the web architectural principles found in AWWW v1 (which contains over 30 principals, constraints, and practices) and other TAG findings, not all of them are explicitly stated in the thesis, so technically there is more to the architecture of the web than just REST. For example, the AWWW v1 contains the following practice that is not strictly required by REST: *Good practice: Avoiding URI aliases -- A URI owner SHOULD NOT associate arbitrarily different URIs with the same resource.* So calling the web architectural style simply "REST" wouldn't be entirely accurate. Ultimately, its up to the industry to decide if a new term is needed or not. If the term "WOA" is needed it will grow in usage (for example, like Ajax), if not, it won't (for example, like WSA - Web Services Architecture). I coined the term back around September 2005 and first used in publicly around December 2005. Here it is 2 1/2 years later and its still just kind of kicking around, so who knows. I don't care what we call it. Naming is a "color of the bikeshed" issue. Let's just all agree to try to understand the architectural principles of the web and then see how far we can push them. -- Nick
