07/07/08 :: [REST] The real Face of REST [permalink]
Matt McKnight argued on one of my posts at InfoQ that:
Yet REST and now the WOA crowd continue to argue that SOA, contracts and governance are just unnecessary complexities. The whole web works off REST so why not every-one's IT shop? Just mash everything up without any contracts (stuff like security, transactions and service levels) and let it evolve.
People don't need governance to re-use a service- they need documentation and sample code.
A WSDL doesn't tell me much semantically, it's true. That's why they invented documentation a few years ago. Not everything has to be done spewed out in XML.
What an outstanding summary of the current thinking of the (other) REST community. (Again, nothing that I say applies to Roy's REST).
Any volunteer to test these proposals? Common on, they are so tempting.
Before you volunteer, you will note that not a single time the (other) REST community could point to a successful REST-based implementation of an information system. But that just a detail. All their arguments are as hot as the air of the REST bubble. You would also think that some people would have had the intellectual integrity to relate some elements of the definitive arguments that I have made about REST and contracts. I guess that simply prove who they are and what we can expect from them. I am sure CEOs are going to be thrilled by the value proposition of letting their IT "evolve". Rabelais would find our times fascinating, how can it be that easy to make people jump off the cliff?
The real issue with SOA is that developers and architects, at large, are not prepared to deal with a "contract-first" approach which is the essence of Services. Pretty much everything in current CRUD-oriented Synchronous Client/Server programming model is pushing for implicit inter-actions buried at the controller(s) level. SOA has to undo 40 years of damage to the programming model which has been dominated naively by the programming languages and middleware people.
SOA is about the emergence of an information and process centric programming model. No wonder a lot of people can't deal with it or feel they will be disrupted by it. Make no mistake, REST is by far the most stupid direction in which IT can go today. If this quote from Mark cannot convince you of it, what will?
Matt, good luck with your REST implementation. Let's talk about it in a couple of years !