PUBLIC MARKS from mbertier with tags rest & "web services"

Ah, so if these issues just turn out to be misunderstandings on your part then Microsoft will just use the APP and not roll out its own protocol? I'm so glad to hear that.

Joe Gregorio answered some questions about WADL in his post "Do we need WADL?". Also note that Leonard Richardson has chimed in recently on the WADL issue. And I of course have some different thoughts. :-)

Besides all these negative points, there are very strong positive points as well. OK, SOAP/WSDL might not be the best choice for every application, but for many at least it is a not so bad one. And even if code generation does not always work perfectly, it usually saves a lot of work. There is just this feeling that there should be something simpler, more straight-forward, and more intuitive. And then REST enters the stage. It is not that REST by definition is easier than SOAP/WSDL. In fact, for machines it is not easier at all.

Last week, Google's Thomas Steiner unveiled that he is working on a Google project for generating language specific client libraries from WADL and generating WADL from documentation examples, tentatively called Google REST Compile and Google REST Describe. Thomas chose WADL as the description language to be used with the new tool, after examining all the alternatives

If there are many clients then the demands for caching semantics will be begin to dominate. In that case you need to abandon HTTP as just a simple transport and start using the application level semantics of HTTP to start leveraging the caching architecture already built into the Internet.

This is like asking Karl Rove and Dick Cheney to write the Democratic Party platform.

Simplicity is a virtue. And in software development, it's an essential virtue. The venerable Jargon File has long had a particularly good adjective for systems that aren't simple: They are baroque.

by Joe Gregorio

The small community that is coalescing around REST/HTTP should prioritize the following objectives above anything else at this point: 1. Raise awareness of what HTTP is capable of. 2. Fix the tools.

This page is a discussion of the strengths, weaknesses and implementations of the HTTP GET/POST binding for WSDL. This binding is fairly good but is lacking some features that would make it useful for sophisticated real-world web services.

This page provides links to a number of works on using and describing REST services.

Traduction en français d'articles écrits par Joe Gregorio dans le cadre de la rubrique « RESTful » de XML.com.

Joe Gregorio's latest XML.com column. "Of the four interface constraints of REST, the last one, 'hypermedia as the engine of application state', is the least utilitzed. This article builds the concept from the ground up, and then applies it to the design of our Bookmark Web Service."

"I think we had one person inquire about using the SOAP version of the API. I don't know if any apps were actually built. There is at least one application built on XML-RPC. But all the others--I don't even know how many there are--are built on the REST API. It's just so easy to develop that way;"

Un peu de tout dans cette nouvelle chronique de Alain Lefebvre