WS-* Advantages
June 11, 2007
Here’s my (incomplete) list of scenarios of when you’d want an alternative to a RESTful protocol….
Very good list. Stu also quotes my three suggestions; taken out of context, one might believe that I believe them to be true. I don’t; here’s what I wrote in my original post:
I’ll make some guesses (note that these don’t reflect my opinions)
WS-* is “protocol independent”, while REST (in all practical relevance) is tied to HTTP.
The WS-* specs address “enterprise” concerns that REST/HTTP can’t handle
It’s much easier to expose an existing system that has a “transactional” interface (in the TP monitor sense) via WS-* than via REST, since the latter requires a real architectural change and the former doesn’t
Are there any other benefits that WSDL/SOAP/WS-* is claimed to have over REST/HTTP?
For the record, I believe that (1) is an illusion since the HTTP protocol is just replaced with a different protocol, one that has no or at least a much worse design, and the protocol independence is an extremely leaky abstraction in real applications anyway; regarding (2), the specs that do address enterprise concerns are not yet widely adopted anyway and in many cases address something that doesn’t belong in the infrastructure layer anyway. I do believe that (3) is a valid point.
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This page contains a single entry from Stefan Tilkov's Random Stuff posted on June 11, 2007 7:44 AM. The previous post in this blog was APP not General Purpose?. The next post in this blog is On APP and GData. Many more can be found on the main index page or by looking through the archives.
Comments
Yeah, as I was re-reading the entry later today I thought I may have not clarified that the 3 points I quoted were out of context, but you beat me to clarifying it ;-)
Posted by: Stu Charlton at June 11, 2007 8:15 AM | link
See my comments in: http://www.marcdegraauw.com/2007/06/11/when-rest-advantages-weigh-less/
“We could reverse this argument: when do the advantages of REST (caching, linking and bookmarking to name some) matter less? For one of my customers I design part of the Dutch national healthcare exchange, which is used to exchange patient data between care providers. Nearly all messages involved include the patient id: therefore most messages are pretty unique…”
Posted by: Marc de Graauw at June 12, 2007 10:56 AM | link
There is an advantage to using HTTP because there is a lot of software available for it, even though the end result may not use all the features of HTTP.
Posted by: Patrick Logan at June 12, 2007 4:29 PM | link