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Re: REST has too many verbs

• To: xml-dev@l...
• Subject: Re: REST has too many verbs
• From: Mike Champion <mc@x...>
• Date: Mon, 11 Feb 2002 15:47:40 -0500
• In-reply-to: <1013462175.845.164.camel@l...>

2/11/2002 4:16:14 PM, "Simon St.Laurent" <simonstl@s...> wrote:

>You seem to have visions of a completely different set of problems than
>the ones which interest me.  If you want to go build immense corporate
>portals, go to it.  

Uh, yeah, that's what the various REST/HTTP/WebServices/WS-I threads have in 
common -- people are trying to leverage this Web stuff to build immense 
corporate and trans-corporate systems.  You are quite sane to avoid this knotty 
issue, but it's not a luxury that many of us have.  Sigh.


>I guess you've never been through the pain of writing an entire book on
>Cookies.  HTTP may be good enough for a lot of things, but calling it
>wonderful is a hard sell.

I don't believe that anyone has argued that cookies are REST-ful!  Quite the 
contrary!!!  Nor that HTTP is "wonderful" in every aspect.

But let's not get into another mutual misconception mismatch thread -- Paul's 
argument seems to be that the REST architecture is at a very minimum something 
to seriously consider when designing the web services infrastructure; HTTP to 
some significant extent implements the REST architecture, and sticking (when 
possible) to those parts that overlap with REST seems like a Best Practice 
guideline; and he's predicting that the web services practices that violate 
REST principles and/or HTTP best practices are going to cause their 
perpetrators a lot of grief down the road.  

I understand where Simon is coming from, but I'd like to hear a response to 
Paul from the mainstream folks who apparently believe that HTTP *is* going to 
work just fine for intrinsically stateful message exchanges using resources 
identified in the content of a POST rather than the URI. [Just to pull some 
apparent violations of REST out of some of the SOAP-RPC paradigm].  And from 
those who believe that the Internet is going to be sufficiently reliable for 
complex synchronous messaging Real Soon Now, even though [as Dan Gillmor points 
out in 
http://www.siliconvalley.com/mld/siliconvalley/business/columnists/dan_gillmor/
ejournal/2649436.htm " The network connection [at Demo 2002] just failed. 
Incredible. If famous technology and telecom companies can't make it work for 
this crowd -- some top technologists and journalists -- do you believe it will 
ever work for regular folks?"

• Follow-Ups:
  • Re: REST has too many verbs
    • From: Gavin Thomas Nicol <gtn@r...>
  • Re: REST has too many verbs
    • From: Paul Prescod <paul@p...>
  • Re: REST has too many verbs
    • From: "Simon St.Laurent" <simonstl@s...>

• References:
  • Re: REST has too many verbs
    • From: "Simon St.Laurent" <simonstl@s...>

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