Re: A REST challenge

Francis and all,

> I have my doubts about the REST architecture, not as a valid
> technological solution but from a religious POV (i.e., it seems to me
> that RESTers are a pretty religious lot)

I am not a religious RESTafarian.  ebXML, in which I participated,
uses message-oriented SOAP.

However, when we got to the next level - orchestrating
business conversations - business semantics became
much more important.  We found that the simplest and
most declarative method of orchestrating business conversations
was around the states of semantic business objects,
which could very well be implemented as REST resources.

> As to my preferred approach, you need the notions of an agent, a
> conversation, communicative acts, a contract, a social/business
> relationship before you can properly model the normal business cycle.

My point is that a lot of those concepts, as well as those in
"the normal business cycle" are well-modeled as nouns, that is,
REST resources.  It's more natural for contract to be a
REST resource than it is to be a correlation-id.

Those conversations are *about* something.
Contracts, orders, deliveries, products, payments, etc.

ISO Open-EDI Rule 1 says something like "you're
not just exchanging data, but making business
commitments".  Those business commitments,
and their fulfillments, are the residual effect of
the messages being sent back and forth, and
can even be the destination of messages.
I would think that modeling them as first-class
persistent resources would meet your semantic
goals better than having them be second-class objects.

I'm not really trying to sell you anything here.
Just wondering why a semantic modeler
wouldn't love REST.

-Bob Haugen

Received on Wednesday, 17 July 2002 17:20:52 UTC