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GET, POST, Operations and REST

Stefan Tilkov,

Sanijiva defends Axis2’s REST support. I’m still not convinced. One issue:

For those of you who haven’t read the above, their point is that Axis2 allows one to offer a GET binding (with data going in query parameters) to any operation of the service. The right thing to do, of course, is only offer a GET binding to safe operations and not to everything. The others should get a POST binding.

It seems to me that the right thing would be to get rid of the operations (or map them to the HTTP verbs, which is essentially the same thing as getting rid of them). I continue to believe that there is a fundamental and non-mappable difference between a REST approach and a WSDL approach. And the WSDL 2.0 HTTP binding, unless I’m mistaken, seems to suffer from the same problem. Unless someone cares to show me what the WSDL 2.0 description of this would be?

Something can be “POX” without being REST — if Axis2’s documentation called it that, I’d shut up (on this issue, at least).

On September 15, 2008 7:06 PM, Keith Author Profile Page said:

Hi Stefan,

Sorry I missed this blog post and I’ve missed it for a long time, but better late that never. I’ve written a WSDL 2.0 doc for the scenario you have discribed you find find the details in my blog at http://www.keith-chapman.org/2008/09/restfull-mashup-with-wsdl-20-wso2.html, It ended up being a bit of a lengthy post. I would like to know your comments on it.