The "REST vs. WS-* War" is Over?
July 18, 2007
To anybody who’s paying attention and who’s not a hopeless partisan, the war between REST and WS-* is over. The war ended in a truce rather than crushing victory for one side—it’s Korea, not World War II. The now-obvious truth is that both technologies have value, and both will be used going forward.
I couldn’t disagree more — I’m seeing this particular reasoning more and more often in the last few months:
A RESTful approach is a natural for data-oriented applications that focus on create/read/update/delete scenarios.
… with the implicit assumption that this restricts RESTful HTTP to an alternative applicable only for a subset of scenarios. To which I say: Bullshit.
Update: Peter Williams writes:
I expect that when all is said and done WS-* will still be around. But rather than as a vibrate technology platform, the way Mr Chappell seems to anticipate, I think it survive in a way far more like the way Cobol is still around today: as a zombie, unkillable and ready to eat the brain of anyone who wanders too close the legacy systems.
Update 2: Elliotte Rusty Harold:
That’s a nice analogy. Take it one step further though. WS-* is North Korea and REST is South Korea. While REST will go on to become an economic powerhouse with steadily increasing standards of living for all its citizens, WS-* is doomed to sixty+ years of starvation, poverty, tyranny, and defections until it eventually collapses from its own fundamental inadequacies and is absorbed into the more sensible policies of its neighbor to the South.
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This page contains a single entry from Stefan Tilkov's Random Stuff posted on July 18, 2007 2:10 PM. The previous post in this blog was Reading References. The next post in this blog is iPhone's AJAX SDK: No, thank you.. Many more can be found on the main index page or by looking through the archives.
Comments
I disagree with using data (CRUD) vs. business process as the decision axis. That is a meaningless way to draw fake distinctions.
In a recent post (see link comment link) I argue that:
1) Client/Server Request/Response systems should use REST. 2) P2P and asynchronous message passing systems should use SOA.
John
Posted by: John D. Heintz at July 18, 2007 5:05 PM | link
John, did you mean to write “message passing systems should use SOA”, or was that supposed to be “use SOAP”?
Posted by: Stefan Tilkov at July 19, 2007 11:02 PM | link
Stefan,
Thanks for your question. I plan on re-organizing my thoughts and publishing this idea again. More clearly this next time :)
Posted by: John D. Heintz at July 23, 2007 5:15 PM | link