Re: amazon: rest and soap

On Monday, April 7, 2003, 5:07:41 PM, noah wrote:


nuic> Chris Lilley quotes Tim O'Reilly:

>>> Despite all of the corporate hype over the SOAP 
>>> stack, this is pretty compelling evidence that 
>>> developers like the simpler REST approach. 

nuic> It is?

Its reported to be. Note: Tim O'Reillys words, not mine.

nuic>  I think it's pretty compelling evidence that a set of
nuic> early-adopter developers found REST/XML more suitable to their current 
nuic> needs, and that is indeed interesting.

Yes, I thought so.

nuic>  I'm not sure it says very much
nuic> beyond that, and even as someone who thinks SOAP is important, I don't 
nuic> find this traffic report surprising.  First of all, SOAP depends on an 
nuic> infrastructure that is just turning the corner in terms of truly 
nuic> widespread deployment.  I'm sure that had Google deployed the 
nuic> corresponding interfaces a number of years ago, we  would have found that 
nuic> Gopher, ftp, telnet or email interfaces would have generated more search 
nuic> traffic than REST, because the infrastructure to do HTTP/XML was mainly in 
nuic> the hands of early adopters.  I just don't think we know what the balance 
nuic> will be for various developers as we move forward.

Sure. I was reporting what had been said, and the datapoint; and the
fact that there are these two interfaces so people can actually compare
them and choose the appropriate one for the job. I was not necessarily
endorsing the conclusions. people on this list are expected to draw
their own conclusions from data, they don't need me to do it for them.

nuic> The interesting comparison is not just REST vs. SOAP, but REST alone vs. 
nuic> RESTful SOAP (which, as you know, is supported by SOAP 1.2.)

That is a good point.

nuic> I'd love to see Google deploy a RESTful SOAP interface,
nuic> supporting HTTP get, as SOAP 1.2 infrastructure becomes more
nuic> prevalent.

Yes, that would be valuable in my opinion.

-- 
 Chris                            mailto:chris@w3.org

Received on Monday, 7 April 2003 13:13:36 UTC