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At 02:50 PM 6/12/2002 -0400, Mike Champion wrote:
>Cheer up ... remember Bob and Blackbird ....the folks at Microsoft may
>or may not be evil :~) but they are certainly not stupid.
>If REST is really more successful in the real world, the vendors will
>embrace and extend it as happily as they did HTML, HTTP, XML, etc.,
>and the magical toolkits will generate HTTP as readily as they do SOAP-RPC
>today.
I don't think so, actually. Web Services isn't a single-vendor project,
and having both Microsoft and IBM behind something is momentum that's hard
to ignore. They've successfully rounded up lots of partners, largely on
the grounds of that momentum.
It's nice to think that technological excellence matters, but I don't think
it's nearly as compelling to vendors as you suggest. Technological failure
does matter, but it can take a while to manifest itself.
>But don't underestimate the very real challenges that HTTP doesn't address
>"out of the box", so RESTful applications do have to address them.
Sure. There are very real challenges that XML itself doesn't address
either. Is that a bug or a feature? Who do you want to have deciding how
to address these issues?
>It's neither stupid nor evil to hope for an infrastructure-level
>solution to the reliability, transaction, business-level
>message routing, etc. issues that Mr. Box refers to when he criticizes HTTP.
Sure thing. I see a lot of Web Services folks focusing on a future that
doesn't use HTTP. I suspect they chose HTTP because it was conveninent,
not because they liked its capabilities. The same goes for XML, and I
heartily encourage these vendors to find a more appropriate toolkit than
XML for their messaging.
>The challenge is to build solutions to these problems in a way that doesn't
>negate the advantages of the Web architecture, which is going to be
>interesting.
I don't believe that's possible given current Web Services mindsets. They
appear to have infinitely more interest in easily sold use cases than in
"the advantages of the Web architecture" - which is fine, provided they get
off the Web rather than polluting it. There's lots of room for them on the
Internet, which has much more open architecture.
>All those ugly useless SOAP headers just might come in handy ... Of course,
>that might be the Kool-Aid speaking :~)
I just hope it's electric Kool-Aid.
Simon St.Laurent
"Every day in every way I'm getting better and better." - Emile Coue
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