News and views from a software developer's perspective
Thursday, April 25, 2002It is past time that the W3C called an end to its involvement in web services -- Edd Dumbill
If SOAP becomes DCOM 2 (or CORBA 2), the only thing that argues for its success is that, unlike DCOM and CORBA, it is supported by Microsoft and the rest of the world. However, when I see how complex web services standards are becoming, I just can't see how the SOAP version of web services will be any more successful than DCOM or CORBA.
Zoe is a email client. It's also a email server. And a long term archive. And a search engine. And an application server. All that at once on your desktop. Or server. Or both. Or it doesn't matter because client and server are the same.
The Fate of Online Music at Internet World. Are music subscription services giving digital music lovers what they want, or was Napster onto something long ago that is still evading the business strategies of the Big Five? [internetnews.com: Top News]
As I mentioned in an earlier post, in the future consumers will "own" far more music than they do today. I think I might own roughly 100 CDs. That is not a lot of music by the standards of the future. Consumers will want far more music because old music gets stale quickly. Consumers will get more music because the costs of production and distribution will fall. This, of course, means that the relatively few music superstars will not be making as much money from recordings. (They will, however, makes lots of money in other ways: fame has its rewards.) The record labels can make money, too. But they will have to produce more music, and produce and distribute it more efficiently.
Okay, here are two of the best articles on REST, both by Paul Prescod.
Second Generation Web Services
Apparently, the REST architecture suggests:
- Use a URI whenever possible
- Actions on URIs should be simple actions, like the HTTP GET, POST, PUT, and DELETE
- Standard data formats are important, and in the future, these formats will probably be XML vocabularies
Each URI identifies a resource, which can be a very general concept. In a sense, it is the concept of a name that is the most important. Therefore, you could consider a "resource" to be anything that can be named (by a URI). The stanardized data formats are also very important. The current Web makes extensive use of HTML, GIF, JPEG, and a few other standard formats.
REST is certainly much simpler than SOAP or XML-RPC. It is more flexible, too, since you can enter a URI into the "URI line" of a web browser. You just can't enter a SOAP RPC invocation into a URI line.
Microsoft exec warns court of computer frustration [IDG InfoWorld] Kind of funny, isn't it? Computer frustration? What's that? *wink*
It's beginning to look (to me) that the REST approach is closer to the Unix philosophy: resources represented by file names and simple components connected by simple mechanisms (<, >, |, etc). The RCP approach is closer to the Windows philosophy: complex applications interacting via COM and scripted by Visual Basic.
If you are serious student of web architecture, then you probably already know about REST. If not, there is a 10-page article (PDF format). I am printing it now, for later reading. Is REST just a purely academic exercise? Or is there something in it for real-world web application developers?
While I don't fully understand REST at this point, my initial impression is that web application design using some of the ideas of REST will be important for web applications to be really successful. RPC interfaces do tend to be rather brittle. Finding a way to make them less brittle would likely make them more "successful".
Here's the problem that I'm hoping REST can solve: If you want to aggregrate a bunch of component web services to create a higher level web service, it may be very difficult because each component service has very specific APIs, object models, etc. For each component service, think of sitting down with 50 pages of documentation that are required reading before you can use that component service effectively. Obviously, in that situation, aggregation is a daunting task. REST is supposedly fundamentally different from RPC. REST is credited with the success of the HTTP/URL/HTML success formula of the current web. Again, I don't fully understand REST, but what I do know seems interesting.
Would web services protocols work for inter-application communication on the same desktop?
Will we ever see standard, open XML formats for common desktop data, like address book info or email messages?