Re: What is the role of REST?

> Again, however, the core
> argument seems to be that you can do RESTifarian choreography, and at worst
> a choreography language doesn't add much.

Further standardization for RESTful choreography *is* necessary, just
not a whole lot of it, because REST already defines an application
model.  As Web services don't define an application model, I can
understand why solutions in this space are so complex in comparison.

>  I personally disagree; without a
> choreography language, how does the "engine" know how to perform a
> particular sequence of GET/PUT/POST/DELETEs?

Because of the implicit nature of the uniform semantics, much sequencing
is performed simply by the successive exposure of URIs.  e.g. GET on
uri1 will return a document with a link to uri2, and a GET on that will
return a link to uri3, etc...  If you combine that with link metadata,
then it can be generalized for other operations, e.g.

GET on uri1 returns;

<post-document-here accept-type="application/foobar+xml" href="uri2"/>

And a POST to uri2 might return;

<PurchaseOrder href="uri3"/>

etc..

The value of implicit operations here can't be overstated.  It permits a
"choreography" to be declared as a state machine, as I did in that
example, where clients are exposed only to the states of the state
machine that they can discover.  In other words, there's no need to
share a description of the choreography up front, as it's discovered
dynamically.  When combined with statelessness, it also permits Web site
admins to delegate parts of their application model by integrating with
somebody else's, for example, to permit a third party to manage payment
services.  As the Web site has no dependency on the specifics of the
state machine of the service provider, integration consists primarily of
substituting their payment service URI for the third party payment
service URI.

That's not really telling anybody anything they couldn't observe just
by ordering a book on Amazon.  But knowing it can be automated might be
valuable to the WG.

Mark.
-- 
Mark Baker.   Ottawa, Ontario, CANADA.        http://www.markbaker.ca

Received on Tuesday, 11 November 2003 09:02:51 UTC