Concerning REST

[Juan de Dios Santander Vela]

El 29/10/2008, a las 8:58, Guy Rixon escribió:

> http://www.from9till2.com/PermaLink.aspx?guid=65d8d39e-bef1-4793-96c1-fa36827f98f1

I've read the article (an exercise of linking "patriotic" values to  
SOA, and naming REST as UnAmerican; not very suitable for an  
International VO Alliance ;-)), but what I think in this issue does  
not relate to it, and it is quite general:

Use the tool that better fits what you want to do.

In my opinion, for many services just HTTP calls with params are more  
than enough; we have got registries that allow service discovery,  
without having to deal with UDDI; and we have VOTable and other XML  
Schemas which encapsulate the meaning we need. We don't need the many  
SOAP transport options, or many other "bells & whistles"

However, doing REST "right", i.e., à la Fielding, means we have to  
decide whether we put known targets first, with operations later, or  
whether we focus on operations and then encode parameters... while the  
typical HTTP params just put everything on the same area.

So, let's be pragmatic on this. We have very successful services not  
using SOAP, but not "properly REST-ful", and I think we should leave  
it like that. On the other hand, all the registry comes from a  
standard using SOAP, and we should also keep it like that.

Reviewing everything, I would just leave the DAL protocols (past and  
future) as they are, and leave new, no DAL protocol, establish what  
they need to use.

-- 
Juan de Dios Santander Vela
Diplomado en CC. Físicas, Ingeniero en Electrónica
Doctorando en Tecnologías Multimedia
Becario Predoctoral del Instituto de Astrofísica de Andalucía

Arjojólico: Dícese del dipsómano andaluz que ha llegado al punto en  
que todo le produce jocosidad.