It's Like Déjà Vu All Over Again
"You could probably waste an entire day on the preceding links alone. But why take chances? We also give you Paul Snively..." — John Wiseman, lemonodor
Rebuttal: "SOAP is, as Prescod acknowledges, a juggernaut. It's better, imho, to accept that it's here, above all the objections that have been raised. Every service that comes online is potentially a killer app for the next layer of the Internet, one that's not confined to HTML browsing. I'm sure that somewhere in this space is huge growth of knowledge-sharing made possible by tools that work better for more people. That's where the prize is, in the activation of minds." [Scripting News]
I think we have another non-debate in the making. All I read the other Paul to say was that Google already had a perfectly functional programmatic interface to their search that they withdrew (at least to their circle of associates) in favor of the SOAP interface, that Google searching is particularly well-suited to a RESTful interface, and that the SOAP interface is needlessly complex and verbose.
I suppose the more potentially-contentious claim is that this is an example of Web Services hype run amok, because the response to the SOAP interface has been loud and swift, whereas the response to the RESTful interface was a yawn. I don't know why even that should be contentious, though; it just happens to be true.
It's true that you can do it with REST, or XML-RPC, or SOAP. But I really wish someone from the XML-RPC/SOAP side of the fence could explain to me why running a program that somehow has to be fed parameters, makes an XML-RPC/SOAP method call, and somehow has to return the result is superior to:
This is admittedly a trivial example; a better one would add query parameters, take the response from one request and POST it to another site, and so on. But the point remains: REST makes web services trivially composable. We already have HTTP and URIs; now we just need to take them seriously. It makes a difference in flexibility and scalability, to name just two dimensions.
Simply put, scripting is great, but why script when you don't need to?
9:34:28 PM Google It!
