I’m here to give a talk tomorrow at the Cities of Knowledge conference, on the topic of citizen use of public data. Walking past Trinity College I saw a sign for Vordel. Hey, I know those guys! Stopped in to have a chat, and while I was there I asked them how they’re getting along now that REST has vanquished WS-*. Of course, from their perspective, that hasn’t happened at all. “For banks and insurance companies,” said VP of Engineering Dave McKenna, “it’s XML in, XML out.”
There’s more than one way to do it.
Update: Vordel’s Mark O’Neill adds:
With our XML Gateways you can support SOAP and REST with the same Web Services, and apply the same policy umbrella to both: http://radio.weblogs.com/0111797/2007/10/05.html
Exactly. As Mark says in that posting, “it isn’t a case of ‘either/or’ for SOAP And REST.” And with today’s release-to-manufacturing of .NET Framework 3.5, REST support in the Windows Communication Foundation means that, there too, you can choose the style that suits your need.
November 19, 2007 at 6:50 pm
I find it ironic that two technologies that are supposed to be about interop want to vanquish each other. Rilke [1] says we need to let go of irony, and not be governed by it. So too must we let go of SOAP v REST. They actually can play nicely *together*, to wit the aforementioned Mark O’Neill gave a good “real world” Web services security talk last week at OWASP (at eBay where I believe these two *do* play nicely together in actual fact), in the case studies section he describes some security considerations for SOAP-Rest integration
http://www.owasp.org/index.php/7th_OWASP_AppSec_Conference_-_San_Jose_2007/Agenda
-Gunnar
[1] Rainer Maria Rilke:
Irony: Do not let yourself be governed by it, especially not in uncreative moments. In creative moments try to make use of it as one more means of grasping life. Cleanly used, it too is clean, and one need not be ashamed of it; and if you feel you are getting too familiar with it, if you fear this growing intimacy with it, then turn to great and serious objects, before which it becomes small and helpless. Seek the depth of things: thither irony never descends—and when you come thus close to the edge of greatness, test out at the same time whether this ironic attitude springs from a necessity of your nature. For under the influence of serious things either it will fall from you (if it is something fortuitous), or else it will (if it really innately belongs to you) strengthen into a stern instrument and take its place in the series of tools with which you will have to shape your art.
Letters to a Young Poet
(translated by M. D. Herter; quoted by Lawrence Weschler in Mr. Wilson’s Cabinet of Wonder)
November 19, 2007 at 6:54 pm
“So too must we let go of SOAP v REST.”
Amen.
November 20, 2007 at 3:22 pm
I can’t speak intelligently to SOAP vs. REST–maybe one day–but I must say that I love that Rilke book.