[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] Re: What Does SOAP/WS Do that A REST System Can't?
On Wed, 30 Mar 2005 18:01:47 -0500, Mark Baker <distobj@a...> wrote: > assuming the data is identical in each case, what's > easiest to integrate? Ten services with ten interfaces, or ten services > with one interface? > > O(N) beats O(NlogN) every day of the week, We've argued about this literallly for years now, and I just don't accept the premise that those 10 RESTful services have a single interface. The real complexity of one approach or the other depends on all sorts of specific factors, not "O(N) beats O(NlogN) every day of the week" Let's consider a contrived example : The "identical data" is an order document, "order" as in a document describing a set of goods or services to be purchased. The various services might be to submit an order, verify that an order was submitted, check the status of an order, determine when an order can be fufilled, process the order to cause it to be fufilled, cancel and order, and so on. So, somehow or other these different operations need to be part of the interface. If I understand REST theory, one would have different URIs for these different services/operations and would GET/PUT/POST/DELETE order documents to the appropriate URI. In a SOAP interface, one could have different endpoints for each, I suppose, but most people would probably have a single endpoint and have each request specify some sort of an operation code to determine which service to request. How is this more complex than having distinct URIs to determine which service to request? You can pay the complexity tax with nouns (URIs) or you can pay it with verbs (operations/service identifiers), but you have to pay it. I maintain that there is no deep architectural principle here -- either approach exposes essentially the same order of complexity from the service provider to the service consumer.
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