RE: Use case comparison of REST & Web services

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Mark Baker [mailto:distobj@acm.org]
> Sent: Friday, September 20, 2002 12:10 PM
> To: Champion, Mike
> Cc: www-ws-arch@w3.org
> Subject: Use case comparison of REST & Web services
> 
> 
> 2. REST approach;
> - find the URI of the service via some means (billboard, 
> Google, etc..)
> - invoke GET which returns XML document
> - feed that response to the code that processes the data
> - return score

OK, but there are some details that aren't described:  What's the exact
syntax for the URI to specify the *specific* bits of information that my
program needs (e.g., the team)? What's the actual schema (broadly defined)
of the result?  How would my program find the specific information it needs
in the response?  Humans can do the "really really late binding" to figure
this out, but I still assert that this is typically bound up in application
code ... hence the appeal of SOAP and WSDL to allow machines to do a later
binding.

I don't particularly expect Mark to agree :-) but I think this could be
useful (perhaps in the Primer) to explain the rationale for SOAP and WSDL in
the context of the Web As We Know It (which may or may not be RESTful, I'm
agnostic).

> The Content-Type header in the response.  I think we can all agree
> that application/xml or application/soap+xml will be common values.

Sure, but XML is only a *meta* syntax

> If you wrote some code that knew about teams, games, scores, etc.. all
> the standardized types that the sports industry decides upon 
> (and their
> corresponding XML schemas), then you could write a program which
> navigated through that information as required.

OK, sure, in some ideal world where industries can agree on simple,
interoperable formats for this kind of thing.  Somebody slap me around a bit
if I'm totally wrong here, but I see WSDL in particular as a way around the
dilemma of needing a standardized schema for some business process before
integration can take place.  With WSDL, you don't need industry-wide
standards, you just need to publish (or let partners discover) the WSDL
description of how someone should send messages to YOU.

Received on Friday, 20 September 2002 13:35:55 UTC