[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?
I've got an actual project I wasn't able to do with REST in a satisfactory way (although I would have liked to). I have been writing a SOAP/WSDL specification for HL7v3 messages for the Dutch Health Authority. Those HL7v3 messages are in XML, and derived from older (v2) non-XML formats, so the messages themselves have a quite venerable age. As an example, an important class of messages is query/response. An example I've been working on is a query with (among others) a patient id, which gets a response with all medication that has been prescribed to this patient. In HL7v3 the queries themselves have a lot of elements. With SOAP this is not much of a problem: both the query and response are XML messages. With REST I have the following options: - Use GET, and translate the query to a URI. Now I have two different formats for query and response, and an awful long and hard-to-read URI. - Use POST to send the XML query and fetch the XML response. This is not very RESTful, since the patient's medication history in the response is naturally a resource, and GET is the RESTful way to retrieve a resource. (If I follow this solution, I would end up using POST for all or almost all HL7v3 interactions. If I add an envelope and headers, I've almost got SOAP over HTTP.) - Use PUT or POST to send the query to the receiver, and have the receiver's server PUT or POST the response to the sender's server. Same objections as above apply. - Rewrite HL7v3 to use simpler queries which map more naturally to REST. Now, of course this is not something I could do on my own, and anyway, I believe a technology should enable me to use existing vocabularies, not force me to rewrite them to enable the technology. (If there had been no HL7v2 or v3, I believe using REST would have been an option, and a different design would have made using REST in a RESTful way possible.) IMHO REST just does not map easily to request/response patterns where the request itself is complex. Regards, Marc | -----Original Message----- | From: Bullard, Claude L (Len) [mailto:len.bullard@i...] | Sent: woensdag 30 maart 2005 18:36 | To: xml-dev@l... | Subject: What Does SOAP/WS Do that A REST System Can't? | | After all the threads on this, I can't remember ever seeing | this question answered. Can someone point me to a list of | the capabilities that one gets using | SOAP/WS* that one won't get using REST? | | len | | ----------------------------------------------------------------- | The xml-dev list is sponsored by XML.org | <http://www.xml.org>, an initiative of OASIS | <http://www.oasis-open.org> | | The list archives are at http://lists.xml.org/archives/xml-dev/ | | To subscribe or unsubscribe from this list use the subscription | manager: <http://www.oasis-open.org/mlmanage/index.php> |
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