RE: Proposed text on reliability in the web services architecture

Mike Champion continued:
> My guess would be that
> it is considerably easier to write adapters and mediators that don't
change
> fundamental architectural principles.  Maybe I'm missing something
myself,
> but it's *hard* to design systems that use the resource/representation
> trasfer model, use safe retrieval and idempotent update, etc. if
you're used
> to ordinary OO design.

In my ordinary OO design, I have orders, products, etc.
Why aren't those perfectly good Web resources with representations
responding to GET?

(Yeah, I know, POST is another ball of mud...but refinement of
POST while adhering to REST would be a good Web service project...)

> I can much more easily imagine writing an adapter
> that simply serializes objects as XML, interfaces with an app server
to
> maintain state, etc. than I can imagine writing an adapter that
presents a
> view of the objects as resources with representations that get
transferred
> around.

What is the essential difference between an XML serialization
and a representation?

> If there was an easy mapping from one to the other, I would have
> thought that the debates over the last year would be much easier :-)

I think to resolve the debates over the last year requires
social and political services, not Web services.  If I could get
my wife to understand and be interested in the situation,
she could whip y'all into shape.

Received on Thursday, 9 January 2003 11:29:20 UTC