Re: [xml-dev] The association of SOA with SOAP, and to the inevitable en

why do you refer to these differences in implementation style as a *war* in which there are winners and losers ?

I see quite a lot of similar commentary from both sides of this apparent divide and for me anyway, it leaves me equally unimpressed.

I have been involved in a number of successful business services implementations using SOAP and a small set of core WS-* protocols for a large, standards based community effort (B2B) across one of the largest financial service sectors in the UK.

More recently I've seen plenty to commend RESTful approaches and would certainly consider it for some of the business services that we offer and call. But it doesn't fit all my requirements, neither do I necessarily expect it to.

These debates still seem to rage ad-nausium, but there seem to me to be few objective facts, and commentator's appear to be keen to exaggerate to make their point or at least be equally opinionated or selective (I'm afraid your comments fall into that camp)

There are many reasons why existing (and on-going) implementations might use SOAP/WS*. Some are just a result of the evolution of ideas around SOA over time, some are to do with the constraints of tooling, some are to do with trading partner and community agreements on their messaging protocols which are more concerned with the end result not the elegance or otherwise of the 'how', and yes, ignorance or selective or superfiscial understanding or what SOA is all about is in there too.

Personally I don't see it as SOAP/WS* = wrong, REST = right

If you think I'm sadly deluded, that's fine, I am always willing to be educated. But you will have to try a bit harder than throwing around the idea that everyone who does or has done SOAP/WS* is either stupid or misled.

Many of us (or perhaps more importantly our business sponsors) are somewhat tired of hearing, 'oops, sorry, we didn't do a very good job of that, but don't worry we have another bright idea about how to sort it all out'. Most times I get challenged with, '.. OK, how is the business going to benefit from yet another 'rip and replace' and how long is it going to take us and all our trading partners to get back to a position of doing business successfully (ideally more successfully than before)...'. This sort of challenge seems perfectly reasonable to me.

Have you really never seen a successful implementation of SOA using SOAP/WS* ?

On 04/12/2007, bryan rasmussen <rasmussen.bryan@gmail.com> wrote:

Hi,

It seems to me that SOA is quite clearly associated in most people's
minds with SOAP and the various Web Services specs. Now there may be
various reasons for this, for example:

1. The association is wholly the product of uninformed people
associating the generic term services with Web Services, or the use of
the term Web Services in descriptions of SOA with SOAP based
webservices.
2. The association is wholly the product of uninformed people thinking
that the three letters SOA are somehow related to the first three
letters of SOAP, which they are in an alphabetical manner but
otherwise not. (I've seen this argument once, I thought it was
interesting)
3. The association is quite clearly caused by every SOA and SOAP guru
talking up that association over the last couple years.
4. some confluence of these factors.

Now I am pretty much prone to accepting number 3 as the reason,
especially when I go through the various SOA books in Safari and they
all talk about the marvels of WS-* and so forth and mention REST in
very disparaging tones, if at all.

This brings me in a round about way to something I have noticed in the
last few months (I guess more accurately over the last year since it
was evident the WebServices winner had been declared) which is SOA
evangelists and architects and so forth first trying to downplay the
association with SOAP instead of embracing it(it seems to me it is the
last year when I have started to hear more often the argument #1 in
the above list) and to start to talk about REST and SOA together.

In the case of people talking about REST as SOA or other combinations
of these terms it seems that there has been a marked hostility in the
community of people who were on the REST side in the recent religious
war (although maybe religious war is not the right term since these
are generally considered to be wars over meaningless things and not
wars over important technical principals) to the linking of SOA and
REST.

So the question now is: with REST the winner just how forgiving will
the new dominion be, and how ruthlessly will the spoils be divided?
(please formulate own poetical metaphors for the destruction of
heretics and associated activities: scourging etc. )

Cheers,
Bryan Rasmussen

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