RE: REST wrap-up (was Re: Web Services Architecture Document

I would argue that the reason you want to limit the number of verbs is that
we are consuming services.  When consuming services, you want to be
descriptive rather than instructive. Verbs tend to be instructive while
nouns are descriptive. 

The difference also lies deeply in where you want the system intelligence to
reside, centrally (instructive) or remotely (descriptive) ?  I argue that
distributing intelligence allows systems to achieve better loose coupling
and extensibility.

Hao

-----Original Message-----
From: David Orchard [mailto:dorchard@bea.com]
Sent: Tuesday, 10 February 2004 11:35
To: 'Jim Webber'; 'Josh Sled'; 'Cutler, Roger (RogerCutler)'
Cc: 'He, Hao'; 'Michael Champion'; www-ws-arch@w3.org
Subject: RE: REST wrap-up (was Re: Web Services Architecture Document


argh.  How many times do we go here?  Both sides are not quite right:
- Web services are NOT RPC as they do not just do Remote Calls.  They assume
the network is there, unlike RPC.  They also support asynch and one-way
MEPs, so they are more than just "Calls".
- Web services are Procedures when they embed the verb in the message.  By
procedures I mean arbitrary verbs, unlike REST which constrains the verbs.
Web services are mostly about defining arbitrary "verbs", as there is very
little uptake of the RESTful Web services.

I argue that Web services can be very succesful in this middle ground, as
long as it allows for extensibility and versioning (touchless compatible
versioning) the way that REST/Web do.  I argue that the constrained
interface, while fundamental in the REST context, also focused on extensible
interfaces (rather than brittle APIs) and it is the extensible interfaces
that are the true critical success factor.

Cheers,
Dave



> -----Original Message-----
> From: www-ws-arch-request@w3.org [mailto:www-ws-arch-request@w3.org]On
> Behalf Of Jim Webber
> Sent: Sunday, February 08, 2004 5:20 PM
> To: Josh Sled; Cutler, Roger (RogerCutler)
> Cc: He, Hao; Michael Champion; www-ws-arch@w3.org
> Subject: RE: REST wrap-up (was Re: Web Services Architecture Document
> 
> 
> 
> Josh:
> 
> > You seem to be arguing that RPC is required due to some 
> > fundamental B2B difficulty?
> 
> I'm starting to think that the REST community is unwilling to hear the
> "rest" of us :-) Very few people in the Web Services 
> community think in
> terms of RPC, yet we are either told, or it is implied, that we are
> doing RPC or DO.
> 
> Web Services are just about messages and message exchanges, 
> and in that
> sense that actually go further than the REST approach factoring out
> interface details. In no way does this imply RPC, or for that 
> matter any
> particular communication pattern.
> 
> Jim
> 
>