[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?
Dare Obasanjo wrote: > However, since on the Web we actually use HTTP GET for fetching RSS > feeds, the fact that some new use of RSS shows up doesn't mean people > like me have to rewrite clients to support them [modulo supporting > extensions to RSS]. Thats it exactly. > It took a while to figure what the uniform interface argument was about > but now I think I get it. As an aside, I think people tend to learn the REST architectural pattern in stages. Once you've nailed down the uniform interface aspect, then there's the "hypertext as engine of application state" bit. I've been wrestling with that one recently. It largely boils down to ensuring that your response documents include hyperlinks, so your client, which understands that uniform interface knows that it can GET those links. It may or may not be able to do something useful with the responses. Many "RESTful" interfaces currently return chunks of XML containing say "person" or "city" elements, often with unique identifiers. Other parts of the service can take those identifiers and return more information about each resource. But you need to teach your client how to construct those URLs, unless the XML has the links in it. So, by introducing a uniform interface you make your client more general. But without hypertext you still need to teach it about the details of the API. By introducing links between resources, you generalise a step further. Which brings you up against the problem of teaching your client about specific document formats. By standardising those formats you reach another level of generalisation. There's a step beyond this which takes us to RDF... Cheers, L.
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