RE: A REST challenge

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Mark Baker [mailto:distobj@acm.org]
> Sent: Tuesday, July 16, 2002 2:30 PM
> To: Francis McCabe
> Cc: www-ws-arch@w3.org
> Subject: Re: A REST challenge
> 
> 
 
> > C places an order with S (which may involve many too-ing 
> and fro-ing, 
> > but let us stipulate for the moment that it can be modeled 
> as a series 
> > of invocations of web services)
> 
> An order document is transferred over POST, which includes a URI to
> which further correspondance should be sent.

How does the buyer find the necessary information to put in the order
document?  The "to-ind and fro-ing" presumably refers to various lookups of
stock numbers, prices, inventory levels.  Of course, you could do that with
HTTP queries, but this gets into some deep waters of REST, and the
mechanical issue of formatting the URIs to do the queries will probably make
the buyer long for WSDL.  Of course, there's no profound conflict between
REST and WSDL ...

So, one way or the other, you are going to have to expose some "methods"
other than the REST/CRUD ones to perform these lookups.  No?   The only
alternative I can think of is to expose the various databases to SQL or
XQuery over the web, and I can't imagine many people doing that.

Received on Tuesday, 16 July 2002 14:30:06 UTC