--- In [email protected], Nick Gall <nick.g...@...> wrote: > > Steve, > > If I listed a handful of references, then you'd ask "where are the stats to > show they are not outliers?" I know all too well after all these years that > NOTHING will convince you of anything. And I'm sure you feel the same way. > :-) > > The survey was done, I assume, by informationweek. But Gartner has done > similar surveys that show REST growing steadily in our enterprise client > base over the years. > > -- Nick >
Nick/Steve, yes, the InformationWeek article is rather unscientific in its presentation of the statistics, and is also around 18 months old. But the first thing that struck me was that still that about 1/3 of the respondents were contructing their SOAs using something *other* than SOAP or REST, presumably MQSeries or similar, and this number was expected to remain pretty constant over the next 18 months. So the only reported movement was between SOAP and REST. This I find rather surprising, but also quite interesting! Shouldn't we be talking more about this other 1/3? The second point I would like to make is that it seems more likely that when people said they were using (or planning to use) REST, they really meant just RPC and POX over HTTP, i.e. what the Richardson Maturity Model calls "REST Level 0". This is emphatically *not* REST, as Roy Fielding and many others would forcibly tell you! In my experience, there is very little real understanding of REST within the industry at large. For example, I ran a conference workshop on REST a couple of months ago and although most of the 30+ attendees had *heard* of REST, none of them could actually say what it was! So I would like to ask you Nick how much evidence you have of the real adoption of REST for system-to-system communication, that is examples of fully hypermedia driven APIs conforming to all of the REST constraints? I suspect that today one could count the number of such systems worldwide on the fingers of one hand. Perhaps Steve has a point that the real *adoption* of "Web Services" has been much more rapid and pervasive than that of [true] REST, because it is much easier to achieve. Disregarding the pros and cons of the competing technical approaches for a moment, I think this points to a real need for REST to communicate its message more clearly so that it can be understood by the wider industry and to generate some form of tool support from the vendors. I think that the present "macho" attitude of many in the REST community who argue that "REST is so simple that you don't need tools" is rather unhelpful to the vast majority of practitioners who just want to get their job done with the minimum of fuss! And besides, I don't see how REST can be *that* simple when the real complexities of the design of hypermedia driven APIs do not seem to be fully understood and certainly not clearly explained, even by the experts! Regards, -Mike Glendinning.
